American political ideas viewed from the standpoint of universal history: three lectures delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in May, 1880

AMERICAN POLITICAL IDEAS

VIEWED FROM THE STANDPOINT OF
UNIVERSAL HISTORY : : . . .

Crtiree lectures

DELIVERED AT THE ROYAL INSTITUTION OF GREAT BRITAIN
IN MAY 1880

By JOHN FISKE

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PREFACE.

lie the spring of 1879 I gave at the Old South
Meeting-house in Boston a course of lectures on
the discovery and colonization of America, and
presently, through the kindness of my friend Pro-
fessor Huxley, the course was repeated at Univer-
sity College in London. The lectures there were
attended by very large audiences, and awakened
such an interest in American history that I was in-
vited to return to England in the following year
and treat of some of the philosophical aspects of
my subject in a course of lectures at the Royal
Institution.

In the three lectures which were written in re-
sponse to this invitation, and which are now pub-
lished in this little volume, I have endeavoured to
illustrate some of the fundamental ideas of Amer-
ican politics by setting forth their relations to the
general history of mankind. It is impossible thor

6 Preface.

oughly to grasp the meaning of any group of facts,
in any department of study, until we have duly
compared them with allied groups of facts ; and
the political history of the American people can be
rightly understood only when it is studied in con-
nection with that general process of political evolu-
tion which has been going on from the earliest times,
and of which it is itself one of the most important
and remarkable phases. The government of the
United States is not the result of special creation,
but of evolution. As the town-meetings of New
England are lineally descended from the village
assemblies of the early Aryans ; as our huge federal
union was long ago foreshadowed in the little leagues
of Greek cities and Swiss cantons ; so the great po-
litical problem which we are (thus far successfully)
solving is the very same problem upon which all
civilized peoples have been working ever since civil-
ization began. How to insure peaceful concerted
action throughout the Whole, without infringing
upon local and individual freedom in the Parts, —
this has ever been the chief aim of civilization,
viewed on its political side ; and we rate the failure
or success of nations politically according to their
failure or success in attaining this supreme end.

Preface. 7

When thus considered in the light of the compara-
tive method, our American history acquires added
dignity and interest, and a broad and rational basis
is secured for the detailed treatment of political
questions.

When viewed in this light, moreover, not only
does American history become especially interest-
ing to Englishmen, but English history is clothed
with fresh interest for Americans. Mr. Freeman
has done well in insisting upon the fact that the
history of the English people does not begin with
the Norman Conquest. In the deepest and widest
sense, our American history does not begin with
the Declaration of Independence, or even with the
settlements of Jamestown and Plymouth ; but it
descends in unbroken continuity from the days
^hen stout Arminius in the forests of northern
Germany successfully defied the might of imperial
Rome. In a more restricted sense, the statesman-
ship of Washington and Lincoln appears in the
noblest light when regarded as the fruition of the
various work of De Montfort and Cromwell and
Chatham. The good fight begun at Lewes and
continued at Naseby and Quebec was fitly crowned
at Yorktown and at Appomattox. When we duly

8 Preface.

realize this, and further come to see how the two

great branches of the English race have the common

{ mission of establishing throughout the larger part

/ of the earth a higher civilization and more permanent

\ political order than any that has gone before, we

shall the better understand the true significance of

the history which English-speaking men have so

V magnificently wrought out upon American soil.

In dealing concisely with a subject so vast, only
brief hints and suggestions can be expected; and
I have not thought it worth while, for the present
at least, to change or amplify the manner of treat-
ment. The lectures are printed exactly as they
were delivered at the Royal Institution, more than
four years ago. On one point of detail some
change will very likely by and by be called for.
In the lecture on the Town-meeting I have adopted
the views of Sir Henry Maine as to the common
holding of the arable land in the ancient German
mark, and as to the primitive character of the peri-
odical redistribution of land in the Russian village
community. It now seems highly probable that
these views will have to undergo serious modifica-
tion in consequence of the valuable evidence lately
brought forward by my friend Mr. Denman Ross,

Preface. 9

in his learned and masterly treatise on " The Early
History of Landholding among the Germans ;" but
as I am not yet quite clear as to how far this modi-
fication will go, and as it can in nowise affect the
general drift of my argument, I have made no
change in my incidental remarks on this difficult
and disputed question.

In describing some of the characteristic features
of country life in New England, I had especially
in mind the beautiful mountain village in which
this preface is written, and in which for nearly a
quarter of a century I have felt myself more at
home than in any other spot in the world.

In writing these lectures, designed as they were
for a special occasion, no attempt was made to
meet the ordinary requirements of popular audi-
ences ; yet they have been received in many places
with unlooked-for favour. The lecture on " Mani-
fest Destiny " was three times repeated in London,
and once in Edinburgh ; seven times in Boston ;
four times in New York ; twice in Brooklyn, N. Y.,
Plainfield, N. J., and Madison, Wis. ; once in Wash-
ington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Buffalo, Cleveland,
Cincinnati, Indianapolis, St. Louis, and Milwaukee;
in Applet on and Waukesha, Wis. ; Portland, Lewis*

10 Preface.

ton, and Brunswick, Me.; Lowell, Concord, New-
buryport, Peabody, Stoneham, Maiden, Newton
Highlands, and Martha's Vineyard, Mass.; Middle-
town and Stamford, Conn.; Newburg and Pough-
keepsie, N. Y. ; Orange, N. J. ; and at Cornell Uni-
versity and Haverford College. In several of these
places the course was given.

Pktebsham, Septemhw 13, 1884,

CONTENTS.

THE TOWN-MEBTINO.

Differences in outward aspect between a village in England and
a village in Massachusetts. Life in a typical New England
mountain village. Tenure of land, domestic service, absence of
poverty and crime, universality of labour and of culture, freedom
of thought, complete democracy. This state of things is to some
extent passing away. Remarkable characteristics of the Puritan
settlers of New England, and extent to which their characters
and aims have influenced American history. Town governments
in New England. Different meanings of the word " city " in
England and America. Importance of local self-government in
the political life of the United States. Origin of the town-meet-
ing. Mr. Freeman on the cantonal assemblies of Switzerland.
The old Teutonic " mark," or dwelling-place of a clan. Political
union originally based, not on territorial contiguity, but on blood-
relationship. Divisions of the mark. Origin of the village
Common. The mark-mote. Village communities in Russia and
Hindustan. Difference between the despotism of Russia and
that of France under the Old Regime. Elements of sound po-
litical life fostered by the Russian village. Traces of the mark

12 Contents,

in England. Feudalization of Europe, and partial metamor-
phosis of the mark or township into the manor. Parallel trans-
formation of the township, in some of its features, into the
parish. The court leet and the vestry - meeting. The New
England town-meeting a revival of the ancient mark-mote.
Vicissitudes of local self-government in the various portions of
the Aryan world illustrated in the contrasted cases of France
and England. Significant contrast between the aristocracy of
England and that of the Continent. Difference between the
Teutonic conquests of Gaul and of Britain. Growth of centrali-
zation in France. Why the English have always been more suc-
cessful than the French in founding colonies. Struggle between
France and England for the possession of North America, and
prodigious significance of the victory of England. — pp. l'7-56.

n.

THE FEDERAL UNION.

Wonderful greatness of ancient Athens. Causes of the political
failure of Greek civilization. Early stages of political aggrega-
tion,— the hundred, the <ppaTpia, the curia ; the shire, the deme,
and the pagus. Aggregation of clans into tribes. Differences
in the mode of aggregation in Greece and Rome on the one
hand, and in Teutonic countries on the other. The Ancient City.
Origin of cities in Hindustan, Germany, England, and the United
States. Religious character of the ancient city. Burghership
not granted to strangers. Consequences of the political differ-
ence between the Graeco-Roman city and the Teutonic shire.
The folk -mote, or primary assembler, and the witenagemote, or

Contents. 13

assembly of notables. Origin of representative government in
the Teutonic shire. Representation unknown to the Greeks and
Romans. The ancient city as a school for political training.
Intensity of the jealousies and rivalries between adjacent self-
governing groups of men. Smallness of simple social aggregates
and universality of warfare in primitive times. For the forma-
tion of larger and more complex social aggregates, only two
methods are practicable, — conquest or federation. Greek at-
tempts at employing the higher method, that of federation. The
Athenian hegemony and its overthrow. The Achaian and ^to-
lian leagues. In a low stage of poUtical development the Roman
method of conquest with incorporation was the only one practi-
cable. Peculiarities of the Roman conquest of Italy. Causes
of the universal dominion of Rome, Advantages and disad-
vantages of this dominion : — on the one hand the pax romana,
and the breaking down of primitive local superstitions and preju-
dices; on the other hand the partial extinction of local self-
government. Despotism inevitable in the absence of represen-
tation. Causes of the political failure of the Roman system.
Partial reversion of Europe, between the fifth and eleventh cen-
turies, towards a more primitive type of social structure. Power
of Rome still wielded through the Church and the imperial ju-
risprudence. Preservation of local self-government in England,
and at the two ends of the Rhine. The Dutch and Swiss feder-
ations. The lesson to be learned from Switzerland. Federation
on a great scale could only be attempted successfully by men
of English political training, when working without let or hin-
derance in a vast country not preoccupied by an old civilization.
Without local self-government a great Federal Union is impos-
sible. Illustrations from American history. Difficulty of the
problem, and failure of the early attempts at federation in New

14 Contents.

England. Effects of the war for independence. The " Articles
of Confederation " and the " Constitution." Pacific impUcations
of American federalism. — pp. 57-100.

IIL

''MANIFEST DESTINY.'*

The Americans boast of the bigness of their country. How to
"bound" the United States. "Manifest Destiny" of the "An-
glo-Saxon Race." The term " Anglo-Saxon " slovenly and mis-
leading. Statements relating to the "English Race" have a
common interest for Americans and for Englishmen. Work of
the English race in the world. The prime feature of civilization
is the diminution of warfare, which becomes possible only through
the formation of great political aggregates in which the parts
retain their local and individual freedom. In the earlier stages
of civilization, the possibility of peace can be guaranteed only
through war, but the preponderant military strength is gradually
concentrated in the hands of the most pacific communities, and
by the continuance of this process the permanent peace of the
world will ultimately be secured. Illustrations from the early
struggles of European civilization with outer barbarism, and
with aggressive civilizations. of lower type. Greece and Persia.
Keltic and Teutonic enemies of Rome. The defensible frontier
of European civilization carried northward and eastward to the
Rhine by Caesar ; to the Oder by Charles the Great ; to the Vis-
tula by the Teutonic Knights; to the Volga and the Oxus by
the Russians. Danger in the Dark Ages from Huns and Mon-
gols on the one hand, from Mussulmans on the other. Immense

Contents. 15

increase of the area and physical strength of European civiliza-
tion, which can never again be in danger from outer barbarism.
Effect of all this secular turmoil upon the political institutions
of Europe. It hindered the formation of closely coherent na-
tions, and was at the same time an obstacle to the preservation
of popular liberties. Tendency towards the Asiaticization of
European life. Opposing influences of the Church, and of the
Germanic tribal organizations. Military type of society on the
Continent. Old Aryan self-government happily preserved in
England. Strategic position of England favourable to the early
elimination of warfare from her soil. Hence the exceptionally
normal and plastic political development of the English race.
Significant coincidence of the discovery of America with the
beginnings of the Protestant revolt against the asiaticizing ten-
dency. Significance of the struggle between Spain, France, and
England for the possession of an enormous area of virgin soil
which should insure to the conqueror an unprecedented oppor-
r— tunity for future development. The race which gained control
' of North America must become the dominant race of the world,
and its political ideas must prevail in the struggle for life.
Moral significance of the rapid increase of the English race in
America. Fallacy of the notion that centralized governments
are needed for very large nations. It is only through federal-
ism, combined with local self-government, that the stability of
so huge an aggregate as the United States can be permanently
maintained. What the American government really fought for
in the late Civil War. Magnitude of the results achieved. Un»
precedented military strength shown by this most pacific and
industrial of peoples. Improbability of any future attempt to
break up the Federal Union. Stupendous future of the English
race, — in Africa, in Australia, and in the islands of the Pacific

L

16 Contents.

Ocean. Future of the English language. Probable further
adoption of federalism. Probable effects upon Europe of indus-
trial competition with the United States : impossibility of keep-
ing up the present miUtary armaments. The States of Europe
will be forced, by pressure of circumstances, into some kind of
federal union. A similar process will go on until the whole of
mankind shall constitute a single political body, and warfare
shall disappear forever from the face of the earth. — pp. 101-152.

AMERICAN POLITICAL IDEAS,

THE TOWN. MEETING.

The traveller from the Old World, who has a
few weeks at his disposal for a visit to the Unit-
ed States, usually passes straight from one to
another of our principal cities, such as Boston,
New York, Washington, or Chicago, stopping for
a day or two perhaps at Niagara Falls, — or, per-
haps, after traversing a distance like that which
separates England from Mesopotamia, reaches the
vast table -lands of the Far West and inspects
their interesting fauna of antelopes and buffaloes,
red Indians and Mormons. In a journey of this
sort one gets a very superficial view of the pe-
culiarities, phj^sical and social, which characterize
the different portions of our country; and in
this there is nothing to complain of, since the
knowledge gained in a vacation - journey cannot
well be expected to be thorough or profound.
2

18 American Political Ideas.

The traveller, however, who should visit the Unit-
ed States in a more leisurely way, with the pur-
pose of increasing his knowledge of history and
politics, would find it well to proceed somewhat
differently. He .would find himself richly repaid
for a scijOiiriTf in some insignificant place the very
napie -of. .which; js unknown beyond sea, — just as
'M-ri* Mackenzie Wallace — whose book on Kussia
is a model of what such books should be — got so
much invaluable experience from his months of
voluntary exile at Ivdnofka in the province of
Novgorod, l^ut of the innumerable places which
one might visit in America, there are none which
would better reward such careful observation, or
which are more full of interest for the compara-
tive historian, than the rural towns and mountain
villages of New England; that part of English
America which is oldest in civilization (though
not in actual date of settlement), and which, while
most completely English in blood and in tradi-
tions, is at the same time most completely Amer-
ican in so far as it has most distinctly illustrated
and most successfully represented those political
ideas which have given to American history its
chief significance in the general work of civiliza-
tion^

The United States are not infrequently spoken

The TowTi-meeting, 19

of as a " new country," in terms which would be
appropriate if applied to Australia or New Zea-
land, and which are not inappropriate as applied
to the vast region west of the Mississippi River,
where the white man had hardly set foot before
the beginning of the present century. New Eng-
land, however, has a history which carries us back
to the times of James I. ; and while its cities are
full of such bustling modern life as one sees in
Liverpool or Manchester or Glasgow, its rural
towns show us much that is old-fashioned in as-
pect,— much that one can approach in an antiqua-
rian spirit. jJfVe are there introduced to a phase
of social life which is highly interesting on its
own account and which has played an important
part in the world, yet which, if not actually pass-
ing away, is at least becoming so rapidly modified
as to afford a theme for grave reflections to those
who have learned how to appreciate its valueia As
any far-reaching change in the condition of landed
property in England, due to agricultural causes,
might seriously affect the position of one of the
noblest and most useful aristocracies that has ever
existed ; so, on the other hand, as we consider the
possible action of similar causes upon i\\Q person-
nel and upon the occupations of rural New Eng-
land, we are unwillingly forced to contemplate the

so American Political Ideas.

possibility of a deterioration in the character of
the most perfect democracy the world has ever
seen.

In the outward aspect of a village in Massachu-
setts or Connecticut, the feature which would be
most likely first to impress itself upon the mind
of a visitor from England is the manner in which
the village is laid out and built. Neither in Eng-
land nor anywhere else in western Europe have I
ever met with a village of the New England type.
In English villages one finds small houses closely
crowded together, sometimes in blocks of ten or a
dozen, and inhabited by people belonging to the
lower orders of society ; while the fine houses of
gentlemen stand quite apart in the country, per-
haps out of sight of one another, and surrounded by
very extensive grounds. The origin of the village,
in a mere aggregation of tenants of the lord of the
manor, is thus vividly suggested. In France one
is still more impressed, I think, with this closely
packed structure of the village. In the New Eng-
land village, on the other hand, the finer and the
poorer houses stand side by side along the road.
There are wide straight streets overarched with
spreading elms and maples, and on either side
stand the houses, with little green lawns in front,
called in rustic parlance " door-yards.'^ The finer

The Town-meet'ing, 21

houses may stand a thousand feet apart from their
neighbours on either side, while between the poor-
er ones there may be intervals of from twenty to
one hundred feet, but they are never found crowd-
ed together in blocks. Built in this capacious
fashion, a village of a thousand inhabitants may
have a main street more than a mile in length,
with half a dozen crossing streets losing them-
selves gradually in long stretches of country road.
The finest houses are not ducal palaces, but may
be compared with the ordinary country-houses of
gentlemen in England. The poorest houses are
never hovels, such as one sees in the Scotch High-
lands. The picturesque and cosy cottage at Shot-
tery, where Shakespeare used to do his courting,
will serve very well as a sample of the humblest
sort of old-fashioned !N'ew England farm-house.
But most of the dwellings in the village come be-
tween these extremes. They are plain neat wood-
en houses, in capaciousness more like villas than
cottages. A New England village street, laid out
in this way, is usually very picturesque and beau-
tiful, and it is highly characteristic. In compar-
ing it with things in Europe, where one rarely
finds anything at all like it, one must go to some-
thing very different from a village. As you stand
in the Court of Heroes at Versailles and look down

22 American Political Idem,

the broad and noble avenue that leads to Paris,
the effect of the vista is much like that of a
New England village street. As American villages
grow into cities, the increase in the value of land
usually tends to crowd the houses together into
blocks as in a European city. But in some of our
western cities founded and settled by people from
New England, this spacious fashion of building
has been retained for streets occupied by dwell-
ing-houses. In Cleveland — a city on the south-
ern shore of Lake Erie, with a population about
equal to that of Edinburgh — there is a street
some ^"VQ or six miles in length and five hundred
feet in width, bordered on each side with a double
row of arching trees, and with handsome stone
houses, of suflScient variety and freedom in archi-
tectural design, standing at intervals of from one
to two hundred feet along the entire length of
the street. The effect, it is needless to add, is very
noble indeed. The vistas remind one of the nave
and aisles of a huge cathedral.

Now this generous way in which a New Eng-
land village is built is very closely associated with
the historical origin of the village and with the
peculiar kind of political and social life by which
it is characterized. First of all, it implies abun-
dance of land. As a rule the head of each family

The Town-meeting, 23

owns the house in which he lives and the ground
on which it is built. The relation of landlord and
tenant, though not unknown, is not commonly met
with. No sort of social distinction or political
privilege is associated with the ownership of land ;
and the legal differences between real and person-
al property, especially as regards ease of transfer,
have been reduced to the smallest minimum that
practical convenience will allow. Each household-
er, therefore, though an absolute proprietor, can-
not be called a miniature lord of the manor, be-
cause there exists no permanent dependent class
such as is implied in the use of such a phrase.
Each larger proprietor attends in person to the
cultivation of his own land, assisted perhaps by
his own sons or by neighbours working for hire in
the leisure left over from the care of their own
smaller estates. So in the interior of the house
there is usually no domestic service that is not
performed by the mother of the family and the
daughters. Yet in spite of this universality of
manual labour, the people are as far as possible
from presenting the appearance of peasants. Poor
or shabbily - dressed people are rarely seen, and
there is no one in the village whom it would be
proper to address in a patronizing tone, or who
would not consider it a gross insult to be offered

24 Americwn Political Ideas.

a shilling. As with poverty, so with dram-drink-
ing and with crime; all alike are conspicuous by
their absence. In a village of one thousand in-
habitants there will be a poor-house where five
or six decrepit old people are supported at the
common charge; and there will be one tavern
where it is not easy to find anything stronger to
drink than light beer or cider. The danger from
thieves is so slight that it is not always thought
necessary to fasten the outer doors of the house
at night. The universality of literary culture is
as remarkable as the freedom with which all per-
sons engage in manual labour. The village of a
thousand inhabitants will be very likely to have
a public circulating library, in which you may find
Professor Huxley's " Lay Sermons " or Sir Henry
Maine's " Ancient Law " : it will surely have a
high -school and half a dozen schools for small
children. A person unable to read and write is
as great a rarity as an albino or a person with six
fingers. The farmer who threshes his own corn
and cuts his own firewood has very likely a pi-
ano in his family sitting-room, with the Atlantic
Monthly on the table and Milton and Tennyson,
Gibbon and Macaulay on his shelves, while his
daughter, who has baked bread in the morning, is
perhaps ready to paint on china in the afternoon.

The Town-meetmg. 26

In former times theological questions largely oc-
cupied the attention of the people; and there is
probably no part of the world where the Bible
has been more attentively read, or where the mys-
teries of Christian doctrine have to so great an
extent been made the subject of earnest discussion
in every household. Hence we find in the New
England of to-day a deep religious sense combined
with singular flexibility of mind and freedom of
thought.

JA state of society so completely democratic as
that here described has not often been found in
connection with a very high and complex civiliza-
tion. In contemplating these old mountain vil-
lages of New England, one descries slow modifi-
cations in the structure of society which threaten
somewhat to lessen its dignity. The immense
productiveness of the soil in our western states,
combined with cheapness of transportation, tends
to affect seriously the agricultural interests of Kew
England as well as those of our mother-country.
There is a visible tendency for farms to pass into
the hands of proprietors of an inferior type to that
of the former owners, — men who are content with
a lower standard of comfort and culture; while
the sons of the old farmers go off to the universi-
ties to prepare for a professional career, and the

26 America/n Political Ideas.

daughters marry merchants or lawyers in the cit-
ies. The mountain-streams of New England, too,
afford so much water-power as to bring in ugly
factories to disfigure the beautiful ravines, and to
introduce into the community a class of people
very different from the landholding descendants
of the Puritans. When once a factory is estab-
lished near a village, one no longer feels free to
sleep with doors unboltedJ

It will be long, however, I trust, before the sim-
ple, earnest and independent type of character
that has been nurtured on the Blue Hills of Mas-
sachusetts and the White Hills of New Hampshire
shall cease to operate like a powerful leaven upon
the whole of American society. Much has been
said and sung in praise of the spirit of chivalry,
which, after all, as a great historian reminds us,
" implies the arbitrary choice of one or two virt-
ues, to be practised in such an exaggerated degree
as to become vices, while the ordinary laws of
right and wrong are forgotten."* JQ^uite enough
has been said, too, in discredit of Puritanism, —
its narrowness of aim, its ascetic proclivities, its
quaint affectations of Hebraism. Yet these things
were but the symptoms of the intensity of its rev-

* Freeman, "Norman Conquest," v. 482.

The Town-meetvng. 27

erence for that grand spirit of Hebraism, of which
Mr. Matthew Arnold speaks, to which we owe the
Bible and Christianity. No loftier ideal has ever
been conceived than that of the Puritan who would
fain have made of the world a City of God. If
we could sum up all that England owes to Puri-
tanism, the story would be a great one indeed. As
regards the United States, we may safely say that
what is noblest in our history to-day, and of hap-
piest augury for our social and political future,
is the impress left upon the character of our peo-
ple by the heroic men who came to New England
early in the seventeenth century.

The settlement of New England by the Puri-
tans occupies a peculiar position in the annals of
colonization, and without understanding this we
cannot properly appreciate the character of the
purely democratic society which I have sought to
describe. As a general rule colonies have been
founded, either by governments or by private en-
terprise, for political or commercial reasons. The
aim has been — on the part of governments — to
annoy some rival power, or to get rid of crimi-
nals, or to open some new avenue of trade, or —
on the part of the people — to escape from strait-
ened circumstances at home, or to find a refuge
from religious persecution. In the settlement of

28 American Political Ideas.

New England none of these motives were opera-
tive except the last, and that only to a slight ex-
tent. The Puritans who fled from Nottingham-
shire to Holland in 1608, and twelve years after-
wards crossed the ocean in the Mayflower^ may be
said to have been driven from England by perse-
cution. But this was not the case with the Puri-
tans who between 1630 and 1650 went from Lin-
colnshire, Norfolk and Suffolk, and from Dorset
and Devonshire, and founded the colonies of Mas-
sachusetts and Connecticut. These men left their
homes at a time when Puritanism was waxing
powerful and could not be assailed with impunity.
They belonged to the upper and middle classes
of the society of that day, outside of the peerage.
Mr. Freeman has pointed out the importance of
the change by which, after the Norman Conquest,
the Old-English nobility or theghhood was pushed
down into " a secondary place in the political and
social scale." Of the far-reaching effects of this
change upon the whole subsequent history of the
English race I shall hereafter have occasion to
speak. The proximate effect was that "the an-
cient lords of the soil, thus thrust down into the
second rank, formed that great body of freehold-
ers, the stout gentry and yeomanry of England,
who were for so many ages the strength of the

The Tow7i-meeting, 29

land."* It was from this ancient thegnhood that
the Puritan settlers of New England were mainly
descended. It is no unusual thing for a Massa-
chusetts family to trace its pedigree to a lord of
the manor in the thirteenth or fourteenth century.
The leaders of the New England emigration were
country gentlemen of good fortune, similar in po-
sition to such men as Hampden and Cromwell;
a large proportion of them had taken degrees at
Cambridge. The rank and file were mostly intel-
ligent and prosperous yeomen. The lowest ranks
of society were not represented in the emigration ;
and all idle, shiftless, or disorderly people were
rigorously refused admission into the new com-
munities, the early history of which was therefore
singularly free from anything like riot or mutiny.
To an extent unparalleled, therefore, in the annals
of colonization, the settlers of New England were
a body oi picked men. Their Puritanism was the
natural outcome of their free-thinking, combined
with an earnestness of character which could con-
strain them to any sacrifices needful for realizing
their high ideal of life. They gave up pleasant
homes in England, and they left them with no
feeling of rancour towards their native land, in or-

* Freeman, "Comparative Politics," 264.

30 American Political Ideas.

der that, by dint of whatever hardship, they might
establish in the American wilderness what should
approve itself to their judgment as a god-fearing
community. It matters little that their concep-
tions were in some respects narrow. In the un-
flinching adherence to duty which prompted their
enterprise, and in the sober intelligence with which
it was carried out, we have, as I said before, the
key to what is best in the history of the American
people.

Out of such a colonization as that here described
nothing but a democratic society could very well
come, save perhaps in case of a scarcity of arable
land. Between the country gentleman and the
yeoman who has become a landed proprietor, the
difference is not great enough to allow the es-
tablishment of permanent distinctions, social or
political. Immediately on their arrival in New
England, the settlers proceeded to form for them-
selves a government as purely democratic as any
that has ever been seen in the worldo Instead
of scattering about over the country, the require-
ments of education and of public worship, as well
as of defence against Indian attacks, obliged them
to form small village communities. As these vil-
lages multiplied, the surface of the country came
to be laid out in small districts (usually from six

The Town-meeting. SI

to ten miles in length and breadth) called town-
shi/ps. Each township contained its village togeth-
er with the woodlands surrounding it. In later
days two or more villages have often grown up
within the limits of the same township, and the
road from one village to another is sometimes
bordered with homesteads and cultivated fields
throughout nearly its whole length. In the
neighbourhood of Boston villages and small towns
crowd closely together for twenty miles in every
direction ; and all these will no doubt by and by
grow together into a vast and complicated city, in*
somewhat the same way that London has grown.

From the outset the government of the town-
ship was vested in the Town - meeting, — an in-
stitution which in its present form is said to be
peculiar to New England, but which, as we shall
see, has close analogies with local self-governing
bodies in other ages and countries. Once in each
year — usually in the month of March — a meeting
is held, at which every adult male residing within
the limits of the township is expected to be pres-
ent, and is at liberty to address the meetiiig or to
vote upon any question that may come upj

In the first years of the colonies it seems to
have been attempted to hold town-meetings every
month, and to discuss all the affairs of the com-

32 Americcm Political Idem.

miinity in these assemblies; but this was soon
found to be a cumbrous way of transacting public
business, and as early as 1635 we find selectmen
chosen to administer the affairs of the township
during the intervals between the assemblies. As
the system has perfected itself, at each annual
town-meeting there are chosen not less than three
or more than nine selectmen, according to the
size of the township. Besides these, there are
chosen a town - clerk, a town - treasurer, a school-
committee, assessors of taxes, overseers of the
poor, constables, surveyors of highways, fence-
viewers, and other oflScers. In very small town-
ships the selectmen themselves may act as assessors
of taxes or overseers of the poor. The selectmen
may appoint police-officers if such are required ;
they may act as a Board of Health ; in addition
to sundry specific duties too numerous to mention
here, they have the general superintendence of all
public business save such as is expressly assigned
to the other officers ; and whenever circumstances
may seem to require it they are authorized to call
a town-meeting. The selectmen are thus the prin-
cipal town -magistrates ; and through the annual
election their responsibility to the town is main-
tained at the maximum. Yet in many New Eng-
land towns re-election of the same persons year

The Town-meetmg. 3^

after year has very commonly prevailed. I know
of an instance where the office of town-clerk was
filled by three members of one family during one
hundred and fourteen consecutive years.

Besides choosing executive officers, the town-
meeting has the power of enacting by-laws, of
making appropriations of money for town -pur-
poses, and of providing for miscellaneous emer-
gencies by what might be termed special legisla-
tion. Besides the annual meeting held in the
spring for transacting all this local business, the
selectmen are required to call a meeting in the
autumn of each year for the election of state and
county officers, each second year for the election
of representatives to the federal Congress, and
each fourth year for the election of the President
of the United States.

it only remains to add that, as an assembly of
the whole people becomes impracticable in a large
community, so when the population of a township
has grown to ten or twelve thousand, the town-
meeting is discontinued, the town is incorporated
as a city, and its affairs are managed by a mayor,
a board of aldermen, and a common council, ac-
cording to the system adopted in London in the
reign of Edward I. In America, therefore, the
distinction between cities and towns has nothing

3

34 American Political Ideas.

to do with the presence or absence of a cathedral,
but refers solely to differences in the communal
or municipal government. In the city the com-
mon council, as a representative body, replaces (in
a certain sense) the town-meeting ; a representative
government is substituted for a pure democracy.
But the city officers, like the selectmen of towns,
are elected annually; and in no case (I believe)
has municipal government fallen into the hands
of a self-perpetuating body, as it has done in so
many instances in England owing to the unwise
policy pursued by the Tudors and Stuarts in their
grants of charters.

It is only in New England that the township
system is to be found in its completeness. In
several southern and western states the admin-
istrative unit is the county, and local affairs are
managed by county commissioners elected by the
people. Elsewhere we find a mixture of the
county and township systems. In some of the
western states settled by New England people,
town-meetings are held, though their powers are
somewhat less extensive than in New England.
In the settlement of "Virginia it was attempted to
copy directly the parishes and vestries, boroughs
and guilds of England. But in the southern states
generally the great size of the plantations and the

The Town-meeUng. 35

wide dispersion of the population hindered tlie
growth of towns, so that it was impossible to have
an administrative unit smaller than the county.
As Tocqueville said fifty years ago, " the farther
south we go the less active does the business of
the township or parish become ; the population
exercises a less immediate influence on affairs;
the power of the elected magistrate is augmented
and that of the election diminished, while the pub-
lic spirit of the local communities is less quickly
awakened and less influential." This is almost
equally true to-day ; yet with all these differences
in local organization, there is no part of our coun-
try in which the spirit of local self-government
can be called weak or uncertain. /Thave described
the Town-meeting as it exists in tlie states where
it first grew up and has since chiefly flourished.
But something very like the " town-meeting prin-
ciple" lies at the bottom of all the political life
of the United States. To maintain vitality in the
centre without sacrificing it in the parts ; to pre-
serve tranquillity in the mutual relations of forty
powerful states, while keeping the people every-
where as far as possible in direct contact with the
government ; such is the political problem which
the American Union exists for the purpose of
solving ; and of this great truth every American

36 American Political Ideas.

citizen is supposed to have some glimmeriDg, how-
ever crudej

It has been said that the town-governments of
I^ew England were established without any con-
scious reference to precedent ; but, however this
may be, they are certainly not without precedents
and analogies, to enumerate which will carry us
very far back in the history of the Aryan world.
At the beginning of his essay on the " Growth of
the English Constitution," Mr. Freeman gives an
eloquent account of the May assemblies of Uri
and Appenzell, when the whole people elect their
magistrates for the year and vote upon amend-
ments to the old laws or upon the adoption of new
ones. Such a sight Mr. Freeman seems to think
can be seen nowhere but in Switzerland, and he
reckons it among the highest privileges of his life
to have looked upon it. But I am unable to see
in what respect the town -meeting in Massachu-
setts differs from the Landesgemeinde or cantonal
assembly in Switzerland, save that it is held in a
town-hall and not in the open air, that it is con-
ducted with somewhat less of pageantry, and that
the freemen who attend do not carry arms even
by way of ceremony. In the Swiss assembly, as
Mr. Freeman truly observes, we see exemplified
the most democratic phase of the old Teutonic

The Town-meetmg. 37

constitution as described in the "Germania" of
Tacitus, "the earliest picture which history can
give us of the political and social being of our own
forefathers." The same remark, in precisely the
same terms, would be true of the town-meetings
of New England. Political institutions, on the
White Mountains and on the Alps, not only close-
ly resemble each other, but are connected by strict
bonds of descent from a common original.

The most primitive self-governing body of
which we have any knowledge is the village-com-
munity of the ancient Teutons, of which such
strict counterparts are found in other parts of the
Aryan world as to make it apparent that in its
essential features it must be an inheritance from
prehistoric Aryan antiquity. In its Teutonic form
the primitive village -community (or rather, the
spot inhabited by it) is known as the Marh, — that
is, a place defined by a boundary-line. One char-
acteristic of the mark-community is that all its free
members are in theory supposed to be related to
each other through descent from a common pro-
genitor ; and in this respect the mark-community
agrees with the gens, yivog, or clan. The earliest
form of political union in the world is one which
rests, not upon territorial contiguity, but upon
blood-relationship, either real or assumed through

38 Americom Political Ideas.

the legal fiction of adoption. In the lowest sav-
agery blood-relationship is the only admissible or
conceivable ground for sustained common action
among groups of men. Among peoples which
wander about, supporting themselves either by
hunting, or at a somewhat more advanced stage of
development by the rearing of flocks and herds, a
group of men, thus permanently associated through
ties of blood -relationship, is what we call a clan.
When by the development of agricultural pursuits
the nomadic mode of life is brought to an end,
when the clan remains stationary upon some piece
of territory surrounded by a strip of forest-land,
or other boundaries natural or artificial, then the
clan becomes a mark-community. The profound
linguistic researches of Pictet, Fick, and others
have made it probable that at the time when the
Old- Aryan language was broken up into the dia-
lects from which the existing languages of Europe
are descended, the Aryan tribes were passing from
a purely pastoral stage of barbarism into an incip-
ient agricultural stage, somewhat like that which
characterized the Iroquois tribes in America in the
seventeenth century. The comparative study of
institutions leads to results in harmony with this
view, showing us the mark-community of our Teu-
tonic ancestors with the clear traces of its origin

The Tovmrmeeting. 39

in the more primitive clan ; though, with Mr. Kem-
ble, I do not doubt that by the time of Tacitus
the German tribes had long since reached the ag-
ricultural stage.

Territorially the old Teutonic mark consisted
of three divisions. There was the village marlc,
where the people lived in houses crowded closely
together, no doubt for defensive purposes ; there
was the arable mark^ divided into as many lots as
there were householders ; and there was the ccnn-
mon mark^ or border-strip of untilled land, where-
in all the inhabitants of the village had common
rights of pasturage and of cutting firewood. All
this land originally was the property not of any
one family or individual, but of the community.
The study of the mark carries us back to a time
when there may have been private property in
weapons, utensils, or trinkets, but not in real es-
tate.* Of the three kinds of land the common
mark, save where curtailed or usurped by lords in
the days of feudalism, has generally remained pub-
lic property to this day. The pleasant green com-
mons or squares which occur in the midst of towns
and cities in England and the United States most
probably originated from the coalescence of adja-

* This is disputed, however. See Ross, "Early History
of Landholding among the Germans."

40 American Political Ideas.

cent mark-communities, whereby the border-land
used in common by all was brought into the cen-
tre of the new aggregate. In towns of modern
date this origin of the common is of course for-
gotten, and in accordance with the general law by
which the useful thing after discharging its func-
tions survives for purposes of ornament, it is in-
troduced as a pleasure-ground. In old towns of
New England, however, the little park where boys
play ball or children and nurses " take the air "
was once the common pasture of the town. Even
Boston Common did not entirely cease to be a
grazing-field until 1830. It was in the village-
mark, or assemblage of homesteads, that private
property in real estate naturally began. In tlie
Russian villages to-day the homesteads are private
property, while the cultivated land is owned in
common. This was the case with the arable marh
of our ancestors. The arable mark belonged to
the community, and was temporarily divided into
as many fields as there were households, though
the division was probably not into equal parts:
more likely, as in Russia to-day, the number of
labourers in each household was taken into the ac-
count; and at irregular intervals, as fluctuations
in population seemed to require it, a thorough-
going redi vision was effected.

The Town-meeting, 41

In carrying out such divisions and redivisions, as
well as in all matters relating to village, ploughed
field, or pasture, the mark-community was a law
unto itself. Though individual freedom was by
no means considerable, the legal existence of the
individual being almost entirely merged in that of
his clan, the mark -community was a completely
self-governing body. The assembly of the mark-
men, or members of the community, allotted land
for tillage, determined the law or declared the
custom as to methods of tillage, fixed the dates
for sowing and reaping, voted upon the admis-
sion of new families into the village, and in gen-
eral transacted what was then regarded as the
public business of the community. In all essen-
tial respects this village assembly or marh-mote
would seem to have resembled the town-meetings
of New England.

Such was the mark- community of the ancient
Teutons, as we gather partly from hints afforded
by Tacitus and partly from the comparative study
of English, German, and Scandinavian institutions.
In Russia and in Hindustan we find the same prim-
itive form of social organization existing with
very little change at the present day. Alike in
Hindu and in Russian village - communities we
find the group of habitations, each despotically

42 American Political Ideas.

ruled by 2l jpater-familias ; we find the pasture-
land owned and enjoyed in common ; and we find
the arable land divided into separate lots, which
are cultivated according to minute regulations
established by the community. But in India the
occasional redistribution of lots survives only in
a few localities, and as a mere tradition in others ;
the arable mark has become private property, as
well as the homesteads. In Russia, on the other
hand, re-allotments occur at irregular intervals
averaging something like fifteen years. In India
the local government is carried on in some places
by a Council of Village Elders, and in other places
by a Headman whose oflice is sometimes described
as hereditary, but is more probably elective, the
choice being confined, as in the case of the old
Teutonic kingship, to the members of a particular
family. In the Russian village, on the other hand,
the government is conducted by an assembly at
which every head of a household is expected to
be present and vote on all matters of public
concern. This assembly elects the Village Elder,
or chief executive officer, the tax - collector, the
watchman, and the communal herd-boy; it directs
the allotment of the arable land ; and in general
matters of local legislation its power is as great as
that of the New England town-meeting, — in some

The Town-meeting. 43

respects perhaps even greater, since the precise
extent of its powers has never been determined
bj legislation, and (according to Mr. Wallace)
*' there is no means of appealing against its deci-
sions." To those who are in the habit of regard-
ing Russia simply as a despotically-governed coun-
try, such a statement may seem surprising. To
those who, because the Russian government is
called a bureaucracy, have been led to think of it
as analogous to the government of France under
the Old Regime, it may seem incredible that the
decisions of a village-assembly should not admit
of appeal to a higher authority. But in point of
fact, no two despotic governments could be lesr
alike than that of modern Russia and that of
France under the Old Regime. The Russian
government is autocratic inasmuch as over the
larger part of the country it has simply succeeded
to the position of the Mongolian khans who from
the thirteenth to the fifteenth century held the
Russian people in subjection. This Mongolian
government was — to use a happy distinction sug-
gested by Sir Henry Maine — a tax-taking despot-
ism, not a legislative despotism. The conquer-
ors exacted tribute, but did not interfere with the
laws and customs of the subject people. When
the Russians drove out the Mongols they e^

44 America/n Political Idsas.

changed a despotism which they hated for one in
which they felt a national pride, but in one curious
respect the position of the people with reference
to their rulers has remained the same. The im-
perial government exacts from each village-com-
munity a tax in gross, for which the community
as a whole is responsible, and which may or may
not be oppressive in amount ; but the government
has never interfered with local legislation or with
local customs. Thus in the mir, or village-com-
munity, the Russians still retain an element of
sound political life, the importance of which ap-
pears when we consider that five -sixths of the
population of European Russia is comprised in
these communities. The tax assessed upon them
by the imperial government is, however, a feature
which — even more than their imperfect system
of property and their low grade of mental culture
— separates them by a world-wide interval from
the New England township, to the primeval em-
bryonic stage of which they correspond.

From these illustrations we see that the mark,
or self-governing village-community, is an institu-
tion which must be referred back to early Aryan
times. Whether the mark ever existed in Eng-
land, in anything like the primitive form in which
it is seen in the Russian mir^ is doubtful. Profess-

The Town-meeting, 45

or Stubbs (one of the greatest living authorities
on such a subject) is inclined to think that the
Teutonic settlers of Britain had passed beyond
this stage before they migrated from Germany.*
Nevertheless the traces of the mark, as all admit,
are plentiful enough in England ; and some of its
features have survived down to modern times. In
the great number of town-names that are formed
from patronymics, such as Walsingham "the home
of the Walsiugs," Harlington " the town of the
Harlings," etc.,t we have unimpeachable evidence
of a time when the town was regarded as the
dwelling-place of a clan. Indeed, the comparative
rarity of the word mark in English laws, charters,
and local names (to which Professor Stubbs al-
ludes) may be due to the fact that the word town
has precisely the same meaning. Mark means
originally the belt of waste land encircling the vil-
lage, and secondarily the village with its periphe-
ry. Toxon means originally a hedge or enclosure,
and secondarily the spot that is enclosed : the mod-
ern German zaim^ a " hedge," preserves the origi-
nal meaning. But traces of the mark in Eng-
land are not found in etymology alone. I have

* Stubbs, "Constitutional History," i. 84.
f Kemble, "Saxons in England," i. 59.

46 A^nericcm Political Ideas.

already alluded to the origin of the " common " in
English towns. What is still more important is
that in some parts of England cultivation in com-
mon has continued until quite recently. The lo-
cal legislation of the mark appears in the tuns-
cipesmot^ — a word which is simply Old-English for
" town-meeting." In the shires where the Danes
acquired a firm foothold, the township was often
called a "by" ; and it had the power of enacting
its own " by-laws " or town-laws, as New England
townships have to-day. But above all, the assem-
bly of the markmen has left vestiges of itself in
the constitution of the parish and the manor.
The mark or township, transformed by the proc-
ess of feudalization, becomes the manor. The
process of feudalization, throughout western Eu-
rope in general, was no doubt begun by the in-
stitution of Benefices, or " grants of Eoman pro-
vincial land by the chieftains of the" Teutonic
" tribes which overran the Koman Empire ; such
grants being conferred on their associates upon
certain conditions, of which the commonest was
military service."* The feudal regime naturally
reached its most complete development in France,
which affords the most perfect example of a Ro-

* Maine, " Village Communities," Lond., 1871, p. 133.

The Town-meeting. 47

man territory overrun and permanently held in
possession by Teutonic conquerors. Other causes
assisted the process, the most potent perhaps being
the chaotic condition of European society during
the break-up of the Carolingian Empire and the
Scandinavian and Hungarian invasions. Land was
better protected when held of a powerful chieftain
than when held in one's own right ; and hence the
practice of commendation, by which free allodial
proprietors were transformed into the tenants of a
lord, became fashionable and was gradually ex-
tended to all kinds of estates. In England the
effects of feudalization were different from what
they were in France, but the process was still car-
ried very far, especially under the Norman kings.
The theory grew up that all the public land in
the kingdom was the king's waste, and that all
landholders were the king's tenants. Similarly
in every township the common land was the lord's
waste and the landholders were the lord's tenants.
Thus the township became transformed into the
manor. Yet even by such a change as this the
townsmen or tenants of the manor did not in
England lose their self-government. "The en-
croachments of the lord," as Sir Henry Maine
observes, " were in proportion to the want of cer-
tainty in the rights of the community." The

48 Americcm Political Ideas,

lord's proprietorship gave him no authority to dis-
turb customary rights. The old township-assem-
bly partially survived in the Court Baron, Court
Leet, and Customary Court of the Manor ; and in
these courts the arrangements for the common
husbandry were determined.

This metamorphosis of the township into the
manor, however, was but partial : along with it
went the partial metamorphosis of the township
into the parish, or district assigned to a priest.
Professor Stubbs has pointed out that " the boun-
daries of the parish and the township or townships
with which it coincides are generally the same :
in small parishes the idea and even the name of
township is frequently, at the present day, sunk
in that of the parish; and all the business that
is not manorial is despatched in vestry-meetings,
which are however primarily meetings of the town-
ship for church purposes."* The parish officers,
including overseers of the poor, assessors, and way-
wardens, are still elected in vestry-meeting by the
freemen of the township. And while the juris-
diction of the manorial courts has been defined by
charter, or by the customary law existing at the
time of the manorial grant, "all matters arising

* Stubbs, "Constitutional History/' i. 85.

The Towrh-meetmg, 49

outside that jurisdiction come under the manage-
ment of the vestry."

In England, therefore, the free village-commu-
nity, though perhaps nowhere found in its primi-
tive integrity, has nevertheless survived in partial-
ly transfigured forms which have played no unim-
portant part in the history of the English people.
In one shape or another the assembly of freemen
for purposes of local legislation has always existed.
The Puritans who colonized New England, there-
fore, did not invent the town-meeting. They were
familiar already with the proceedings of the ves-
try-meeting and the manorial courts, but they were
severed now from church and from aristocracy.
So they had but to discard the ecclesiastical and
lordly terminology, with such limitations as they
involved, and to reintegrate the separate jurisdic-
tions into one, — and forthwith the old assembly of
the township, founded in immemorial tradition,
but revivified by new thoughts and purposes gained
through ages of political training, emerged into
fresh life and entered upon a more glorious career.
tit is not to an audience which speaks the Eng-
lish language that I need to argue the point that
the preservation of local self-government is of the
highest importance for the maintenance of a rich
and powerful national life^ As we contemplate
4

50 Americom Political Ideas.

the vicissitudes of local self-government in the va-
rious portions of the Aryan world, we see the con-
trasted fortunes of France and England illustrating
for us most forcibly the significance of this truth.
For the preservation of local self-government in
England various causes may be assigned ; but of
these there are two which may be cited as espe-
cially prominent. In the first place, owing to the
peculiar circumstances of the Teutonic settlement
of Britain, the civilization of England previous to
the Norman Conquest was but little affected by
Koman ideas or institutions. In the second place
the thrusting down of the old thegnhood by the
Norman Conquest (to which I have already al-
luded) checked the growth of a noblesse or adel of
the continental type, — a nobility raised above the
common people like a separate caste. For the old
thegnhood, which might have grown into such a
caste, was pushed down into a secondary position,
and the peerage which arose after the Conquest
was something different from a noblesse. It was
primarily a nobility of ofiice rather than of rank
or privilege. The peers were those men who re-
tained the right of summons to the Great Council,
or Witenagemote, which has survived as the House
of Lords. The peer was therefore the holder of a
legislative and judicial office, which only one of

The Tovm-^meeUng. 51

his children could inherit, from the very nature of
the case, and which none of his children could
share with him. Hence the brothers and younger
children of a peer were always commoners, and
their interests were not remotely separated from
those of other commoners. Hence after the estab-
lishment of a House of Commons, their best chance
for a political career lay in representing the inter-
ests of the people in the lower house. Hence be-
tween the upper and lower strata of English so-
ciety there has always been kept up a circulation
or interchange of ideas and interests, and the effect
of this upon English history has been prodigious.
While on the continent a sovereign like Charles
the Bold could use his nobility to extinguish the
liberties of the merchant towns of Flanders, noth-
ing of the sort was ever possible in England.
Throughout the Middle Ages, in every contest be-
tween the people and the crown, the weight of the
peerage was thrown into the scale in favour of
popular liberties. But for this peculiar position
of the peerage we might have had no Earl Simon ;
it is largely through it that representative govern-
ment and local liberties have been preserved to the
English race.

In France the course of events has brought
about very different results. I shall defer to my

52 American Political Ideas.

next lecture the consideration of the vicissitudes
of local self-government under the Roman Em-
pire, because that point is really incident upon the
study of the formation of vast national aggregates.
Suffice it now to say that when the Teutons over-
came Gaul, they became rulers over a population
which had been subjected for ^nq centuries to
that slow but mighty process of trituration which
the Empire everywhere brought to bear upon lo-
cal self-government. While the Teutons in Brit-
ain, moreover, enslaved their slightly romanized
subjects and gave little heed to their language, re-
ligion, or customs ; the Teutons in Gaul, on the
other hand, quickly adopted the language and re-
ligion of their intensely romanized subjects and
acquired to some extent their way of looking at
things. Hence in the early history of France
there was no such stubborn mass of old Aryan lib-
erties to be dealt with as in the early history of
England. Nor was there any powerful middle
class distributed through the country to defend
such liberties as existed. Beneath the turbulent
throng of Teutonic nobles, among whom the king
was only the most exalted and not always the
strongest, there lay the Gallo-Roman population
which had so long been accustomed to be ruled
without representation by a distant government

The Town-meeting. 53

exercising its authority through innumerable pre-
fects. Such Teutonic rank and file as there was
became absorbed into this population ; and except
in sundry chartered towns there was nothing like
a social stratum interposed between the nobles
and the common people.

The slow conversion of the feudal monarchy of
the early Capetians into the absolute despotism
of Louis Xiy. was accomplished by the king
gradually conquering his vassals one after anoth-
er, and adding their domains to his own. As one
vassal territory after another was added to the
royal domain, the king sent prefects, responsible
only to himself, to administer its local affairs, sed-
ulously crushing out, so far as possible, the last
vestiges of self-government. The nobles, deprived
of their provincial rule, in great part flocked to
Paris to become idle courtiers. The means for
carrying on the gigantic machinery of centralized
administration, and for supporting the court in its
follies, were wrung from the groaning peasantry
with a cynical indifference like that with which
tribute is extorted by barbaric chieftains from a
conquered enemy. And thus came about that
abominable state of things which a century since
was abruptly ended by one of the fiercest convul-
sions of modern times.

54: American Political Ideas.

The prodigious superiority — in respect to na-
tional vitality — of a freely governed country over
one that is governed by a centralized despot-
ism, is nowhere more brilliantly illustrated than in
the contrasted fortunes of France and England as
colonizing nations. When we consider the de-
clared rivalry between France and England in
their plans for colonizing the barbarous regions
of the earth, when we consider that the military
power of the two countries has been not far from
equal, and that France has at times shown herself
a maritime power by no means to be despised, it
seems to me that her overwhelming and irretriev-
able defeat by England in the struggle for colo-
nial empire is one of the most striking and one of
the most instructive facts in all modern history.
In my lectures of last year (at University College)
I showed that, in the struggle for the possession
of North America, where the victory of England
was so decisive as to settle the question for all
coming time, the causes of the French failure are
very plainly to be seen. The French colony in
Canada was one of the most complete examples
of a despotic government that the world has ever
seen. All the autocratic and bureaucratic ideas
of Louis XIY. were here carried out without let
or hinderance. It would be incredible, were it not

The Town-Tneeting. 55

attested by such abundant evidence, that the af-
fairs of any people could be subjected to such mi-
nute and sleepless supervision as were the affairs
of the French colonists in Canada. A man could
not even build his own house, or rear his own
cattle, or sow his own seed, or reap his own grain,
save under the supervision of prefects acting
under instructions from the home government.
No one was allowed to enter or leave the colony
without permission, not from the colonists but
from the king. No farmer could visit Montreal
or Quebec without permission. No Huguenot
could set his foot on Canadian soil. No public
meetings of any kind were tolerated, nor were
there any means of giving expression to one's
opinions on any subject. The details of all this,
which may be read in Mr. f*arkman's admirable
work on " The Old Regime in Canada," make a
wonderful chapter of history. Never was a colony,
moreover, so loaded with bounties, so fostered,
petted, and protected. The result was absolute
paralysis, political and social. When after a cen-
tury of irritation and skirmishing the French in
Canada came to a life -and -death struggle with
the self-governing colonists of New England, New
York, and Virginia, the result for the French
power in America was instant and irretrievable

56 Americcm PoliUcal Ideas.

annihilation. The town -meeting pitted against
the bureaucracy was like a Titan overthrowing a
cripple. The historic lesson owes its value to the
fact that this ruin of the French scheme of colo-
nial empire was due to no accidental circum-
stances, but was involved in the very nature of
the French political system. Obviously it is im-
possible for a people to plant beyond sea a colo-
ny which shall be self-supporting, unless it has
retained intact the power of self-government at
home. It is to the self-government of England,
and to no lesser cause, that we are to look for the
secret of that boundless vitality which has given
to men of English speech the uttermost parts of
the earth for an inheritance. The conquest of
Canada first demonstrated this truth, and when —
in the two following lectures — we shall have made
some* approach towards comprehending its full
import, we shall all, I think, be ready to admit
that the triumph of Wolfe marks the greatest
turning-point as yet discernible in modern his-
tory.

n.

THE FEDERAL UNION.

The great history of Thukydides, which after
twenty-three centuries still ranks (in spite of Mr.
Cobden) among our chief text-books of political
wisdom, has often seemed to me one of the most
mournful books in the world. At no other spot
on the earth's surface, and at no other time in
the career of mankind, has the human intellect
flowered with such luxuriance as at Athens dur-
ing the eighty -five years which intervened be-
tween the victory of Marathon and the defeat of
-^gospotaraos. In no other like interval of time,
and in no other community of like dimensions,
has so much work been accomplished of which we
can say with truth that it is Krrifia Iq act, — an eter-
nal possession. It is impossible to conceive of a
day so distant, or an era of culture so exalted, that
the lessons taught by Athens shall cease to be of
value, or that the writings of her great thinkers
shall cease to be read with fresh profit and de-
light. We understand these things far better

58 Americcm Political Ideas.

to-day than did those monsters of erudition in
the sixteenth century who studied the classics for
philological purposes mainly. Indeed, the older
the world grows, the more varied our experience
of practical politics, the more comprehensive our
survey of universal history, the stronger our grasp
upon the comparative method of inquiry, the more
brilliant is the light thrown upon that brief day
of Athenian greatness, and the more wonderful
and admirable does it all seem. To see this glori-
ous community overthrown, shorn of half its virtue
(to use the Homeric phrase), and thrust down into
an inferior position in the world, is a mournful
spectacle indeed. And the book which sets be-
fore us, so impartially yet so eloquently, the in-
numerable petty misunderstandings and contemp-
tible jealousies which brought about this direful
result, is one of the most mournful of books.

We may console ourselves, however, for the pre-
mature overthrow of the power of Athens, by the
reflection that that power rested upon political
conditions which could not in any case have been
permanent or even long-enduring. The entire po-
litical system of ancient Greece, based as it was
upon the idea of the sovereign independence of
each single city, was one which could not fail
sooner or later to exhaust itself through chronic

The Federal Union. 59

anarchy. The only remedy lay either in some
kind of permanent federation, combined with rep-
resentative government ; or else in what we might
call " incorporation and assimilation," after the
Roman fashion. But the incorporation of one
town with another, though effected with brilliant
results in the early history of Attika, involved such
a disturbance of all the associations which in the
Greek mind clustered about the conception of a
city that it was quite impracticable on any large
or general scale. Schemes of federal union were
put into operation, though too late to be of avail
against the assaults of Macedonia and Rome. But
as for the principle of representation, that seems
to have been an invention of the Teutonic mind ;
no statesman of antiquity, either in Greece or at
Rome, seems to have conceived the idea of a city
sending delegates armed with plenary powers to
represent its interests in a general legislative as-
sembly. To the Greek statesmen, no doubt, this
too would have seemed derogatory to the dignity
of the sovereign city.

This feeling with which the ancient Greek states-
men, and to some extent the Romans also, regarded
the city, has become almost incomprehensible to
the modern mind, so far removed are we from the
political circumstances which made such a feeling

60 Am&riccm Political Ideas.

possible. Teutonic civilization, indeed, has never
passed through a stage in which the foremost posi-
tion has been held by civic communities. Teu-
tonic civilization passed directly from the stage of
tribal into that of national organization, before any
Teutonic city had acquired sufficient importance
to have claimed autonomy for itself; and at the
time when Teutonic nationalities were forming,
moreover, all the cities in Europe had so long been
accustomed to recognize a master outside of them
in the person of the Roman emperor that the very
tradition of civic autonomy, as it existed in ancient
Greece, had become extinct. This difference be-
tween the political basis of Teutonic and of Graeco-
Roman civilization is one of which it would be
difficult to exaggerate the importance ; and when
thoroughly understood it goes farther, perhaps,
than anything else towards accounting for the suc-
cessive failures of the Greek and Roman political
systems, and towards inspiring us with confidence
in the future stability of the political system which
has been wrought out by the genius of the Eng-
lish race.

We saw, in the preceding lecture, how the most
primitive form of political association known to
have existed is that of the cla/riy or group of fami-
lies held together by ties of descent from a com'

The Federal Union. 61

mon ancestor. "We saw how the change from a
nomadic to a stationary mode of life, attendant
upon the adoption of agricultural pursuits, con-
verted the clan into a marh or village-community,
something like those which exist to-day in Russia.
The political progress of primitive society seems
to have consisted largely in the coalescence of these
small groups into larger groups. The first series
of compound groups resulting from the coalescence
of adjacent marks is that which was known in
nearly all Teutonic lands as the hundred, in Ath-
ens as the (jiparpia or brotherhood, in Eome as the
(yuria. Yet alongside of the Roman group called
the curia there is a group whose name, the centu7*y,
exactly translates the name of the Teutonic group ;
and, as Mr. Freeman says, it is difficult to believe
that the Roman century did not at the outset in
some way correspond to the Teutonic hundred as
a stage in political organization. But both these
terms, as we know them in history, are survivals
from some prehistoric state of things ; and whether
they were originally applied to a hundred of houses,
or of families, or of warriors, we do not know.*
M. Geffroy, in his interesting essay on the Germa-
nia of Tacitus, suggests that the term canton may

* Freeman, "Comparative Politics," 118.

62 American Political Ideas.

have a similar origin.* The outlines of these prim-
itive groups are, however, more obscure than those
of the more primitive mark, because in most cases
they have been either crossed and effaced or at any
rate diminished in importance by the more highly
compounded groups which came next in order of
formation. Next above the hundred, in order of
composition, comes the group known in ancient
Italy as the pagus, in Attika perhaps as the deme,
in Germany and at first in England as the gau or
ga, at a later date in England as the shire. What-
ever its name, this group answers to the tribe re-
garded as settled upon a certain determinate terri-
tory. Just as in the earlier nomadic life the ag-
gregation of clans makes ultimately the tribe, so
in the more advanced agricultural life of our Aryan
ancestors the aggregation of marks or village-com-
munities makes ultimately the gau or shire. Prop-
erly speaking, the name shire is descriptive of di-
vision and not of aggregation ; but this term came
into use in England after the historic order of
formation had been forgotten, and when the shi^'e
was looked upon as a piece of some larger whole,
such as the kingdom of Mercia or Wessex. His-
torically, however, the shire was not made, like the

* Geffroy, " Rome et les Barbares," 209.

The Federal Union. 63

d&pa/ri/ments of modern France, by the division of
the kingdom for administrative purposes, but the
kingdom was made by the union of shires that
were previously autonomous. In the primitive
process of aggregation, the shire or gau^ governed
by its witenagemote or "meeting of wise men,"
and by its chief magistrate who was called ealdor-
man in time of peace and heretoga, " army-leader,"
dux, or duhe, in time of war, — the shire, I say, in
this form, is the largest and most complex politi-
cal body we find previous to the formation of king-
doms and nations. But in saying this, we have
already passed beyond the point at which we can
include in the same general formula the process
of political development in Teutonic countries on
the one hand and in Greece and Kome on the
other. Up as far as the formation of the tribe,
territorially regarded, the parallelism is preserved ;
but at this point there begins an all-important di-
vergence. In the looser and more diffused society
of the rural Teutons, the tribe is spread over a
shire, and the aggregation of shires makes a king-
dom, embracing cities, towns, and rural districts
held together by similar bonds of relationship to
the central governing power. But in the society
of the old Greeks and Italians, the aggregation
of tribes, crowded together on fortified hill-tops,

64 Americcm Political Ideas.

makes the Ancient City^ — a very different tiling,
indeed, from the modern city of later-Roman or
Teutonic foundation. Let us consider, for a mo-
ment, the difference.

Sir Henry Maine tells us that in Hindustan
nearly all the great towns and cities have arisen
either from the simple expansion or from the ex-
pansion and coalescence of primitive village-com-
munities; and such as have not arisen in this way,
including some of the greatest of Indian cities,
have grown up about the intrenched camps of
the Mogul emperors.* The case has been just the
same in modern Europe. Some famous cities of
England and Germany — such as Chester and Lin-
coln, Strasburg and Maintz, — grew up about the
camps of the Roman legions. But in general the
Teutonic city has been formed by the expansion
and coalescence of thickly-peopled townships and
hundreds. In the United States nearly all cities
have come from the growth and expansion of vil-
lages, with such occasional cases of coalescence as
that of Boston with Roxbury and Charlestown.
Now and then a city has been laid out as a city
ah initio, with full consciousness of its purpose,
as a man would build a house ; and this was the

* Maine, "Village Communities," 118.

The Federal Union. 65

case Dot merely with Martin Chuzzlewit's " Eden,"
but with the city of Washington, the seat of our
federal government. But, to go back to the early
ages of England — the country which best exhibits
the normal development of Teutonic institutions
— the point which I wish especially to emphasize
is this : m no case does the dty ajppear as equiva-
lent to the dwelling-place of a tribe or of a confed-
eration of tribes. In no case does citizenship, or
burghership, appear to rest upon the basis of a real
or assumed community of descent from a single
real or mythical progenitor. In the primitive
mark, as we have seen, the bond which kept the
community together and constituted it a political
unit was the bond of blood-relationship, real or as-
sumed; but this was not the case with the city or
borough. The city did not correspond with the
tribe, as the mark corresponded with the clan.
The aggregation of clans into tribes corresponded
with the aggregation of marks, not into cities but
into shires. The multitude of compound political
units, by the further compounding of which a na-
tion was to be formed, did not consist of cities but
of shires. The city was simply a point in the
shire distinguished by greater density of popula-
tion. The relations sustained by the thinly-peo-
pled rural townships and hundreds to the gen*

66 American Political Ideas.

eral government of the shire were co-ordinate with
the relations sustained to the same government
bj those thickly-peopled townships and hundreds
which upon their coalescence were known as cities
or boroughs. Of course I am speaking now in a
broad and general way, and without reference to
such special privileges or immunities as cities and
boroughs frequently obtained by royal charter in
feudal times. Such special privileges — as for in-
stance the exemption of boroughs from the ordi-
nary sessions of the county court, under Henry
I.* — were in their nature grants from an external
source, and were in nowise inherent in the posi-
tion or mode of origin of the Teutonic city. And
they were, moreover, posterior in date to that em-
bryonic period of national growth of which I am
now speaking. They do not affect in any way
the correctness of my general statement, which is
sufficiently illustrated by the fact that the oldest
shire -motes, or county -assemblies, were attended
by representatives from all the townships and
hundreds in the shire, whether such townships
and hundreds formed parts of boroughs or not.

Very different from this was the embryonic
growth of political society in ancient Greece and

* Stubbs, " Constitutional Pistorj," i 625.

The Federal TTnim. 67

Italy. There the aggregation of clans into tribes
and confederations of tribes resulted directly, as
we have seen, in the City. There burghership,
with its political and social rights and duties, had
its theoretical basis in descent from a common an-
cestor, or from a small group of closely - related
common ancestors. The group of fellow-citizens
was associated through its related groups of ances-
tral household-deities, and through religious rites
performed in common to which it would have
been sacrilege to have admitted a stranger. Thus
the Ancient City was a religious as well as a politi-
cal body, and in either character it was complete
in itself and it was sovereign. Thus in ancient
Greece and Italy the primitive clan-assembly or
township -meeting did not grow by aggregation
into the assembly of the shire, but it developed
into the comitia or ecclesia of the city. The chief
magistrate was not the ealdormam, of early English
history, but the rex or hasileus who combined in
himself the functions of king, general, and priest.
Thus, too, there was a severance, politically, be-
tween city and country such as the Teutonic world
has never known. The rural districts surrounding
a city might be subject to it, but could neither
share its franchise nor claim a co-ordinate fran-
chise with it. Athens, indeed, at an early period,

68 American Political Ideas.

went so far as to incorporate with itself Eleusis
and Marathon and the other rural towns of Attika.
In this one respect Athens transgressed the bounds
of ancient civic organization, and no doubt it gain-
ed greatly in power thereby. But generally in the
Hellenic world the rural population in the neigh-
bourhood of a great city were mere TreploiKoi, or
" dwellers in the vicinity " ; the inhabitants of the
city who had moved thither from some other city,
both they and their descendants, were mere fiiroi-
Koi, or " dwellers in the place " ; and neither the
one class nor the other could acquire the rights
and privileges of citizenship. A revolution, in-
deed, went on at Athens, from the time of Solon
to the time of Kleisthenes, which essentially modi-
fied the old tribal divisions and admitted to the
franchise all such families resident from time im-
memorial as did not belong to the tribes of eu-
patrids by whom the city was founded. But this
change once accomplished, the civic exclusiveness
of Athens remained very much what it was be-
fore. The popular assembly was enlarged, and
public harmony was secured ; but Athenian burgh-
ership still remained a privilege which could not
be acquired by the native of any other city.
Similar revolutions, with a similarly limited pur-
pose and result, occurred at Sparta, Elis, and other

The Federal Vnirni. 69

Greek cities. At Kome, by a like revolutioD,
the plebeians of the Capitoline and Aventine ac-
quired parallel rights of citizenship with the pa-
tricians of the original city on the Palatine; but
this revolution, as we shall presently see, had dif-
ferent results, leading ultimately to the overthrow
of the city-system throughout the ancient world.

The deep-seated difference between the Teu-
tonic political system based on the shire and the
Grgeco-Roman system based on the city is now, I
think, sufficiently apparent. Now from this fun-
damental difference have come two consequences
of enormous importance, — consequences of which
it is hardly too much to say that, taken together,
they furnish the key to the whole history of Eu-
ropean civilization as regarded purely from a po-
litical point of view.

The first of these consequences had no doubt a
very humble origin in the mere difference between
the shire and the city in territorial extent and in
density of population. When people live near
together it is easy for them to attend a town-
meeting, and the assembly by which public busi-
ness is transacted is likely to remain 2i primary
assembly^ in the true sense of the term. But when
people are dispersed over a wide tract of country,
the primary assembly inevitably shrinks up into

70 Americcm Political Ideas.

an assembly of such persons as can best afford the
time and trouble of attending it, or who have the
strongest interest in going, or are most likely to
be listened to after they get there. Distance and
difficulty, and in early times danger too, keep
many people away. And though a shire is not a
wide tract of country for most purposes, and accord-
ing to modern ideas, it was nevertheless quite wide
enough in former times to bring about the result
I have mentioned. In the times before the ISTor-
man conquest, if not before the completed union
of England under Edgar, the shire-mote or county
assembly, though in theory still a folk -mote or
primary assembly, had shrunk into what was vir-
tually a witenagemote or assembly of the most im-
portant persons in the county. But the several
townships, in order to keep their fair share of con-
trol over county affairs, and not wishing to leave
the matter to chance, sent to the meetings each its
representatives in the persons of the town-reeve
and four "discreet men." I believe it has not
been determined at what precise time this step
was taken, but it no doubt long antedates the
Norman conquest. It is mentioned by Professor
Stubbs as being already, in the reign of Henry III.,
a custom of immemorial antiquity.* It was one

* Stubbs, "Select Charters," 401.

The Federal Uni<m, 71

of the greatest steps ever taken in the political
history of mankind. In these four discreet men
we have the forerunners of the two burghers from
each town who were summoned by Earl Simon to
the famous parliament of 1265, as well as of the
two knights from each shire whom the king had
summoned eleven years before. In these four
discreet men sent to speak for their township in
the old county assembly, we have the germ of
institutions that have ripened into the House of
Commons and into the legislatures of modern king-
doms and republics. In the system of representa-
tion thus inaugurated lay the future possibility of
such gigantic political aggregates as the United
States of America.

In the ancient city, on the other hand, the ex-
treme compactness of the political structure made
representation unnecessary and prevented it from
being thought of in circumstances where it might
have proved of immense value. In an aristocratic
Greek city, like Sparta, all the members of the rul-
ing class met together and voted in the assembly ;
in a democratic city, like Athens, all the free citi-
zens met and voted; in each case the assembly
was primary and not representative. The only
exception, in all Greek antiquity, is one which
emphatically proves the rule. The Amphiktyonic

72 Americom Political Ideas.

Council, an institution of prehistoric origin, con-
cerned mainly with religious affairs pertaining to
the worship of the Delphic Apollo, furnished a
precedent for a representative, and indeed for a
federal, assembly. Delegates from various Greek
tribes and cities attended it. The fact that with
such a suggestive precedent before their eyes the
Greeks never once hit upon the device of repre-
sentation, even in their attempts at framing fed-
eral unions, shows how thoroughly their whole
political training had operated to exclude such a
conception from their minds.

The second great consequence of the Grseco-
Roman city-system was linked in many ways with
this absence of the representative principle. In
Greece the formation of political aggregates high-
er and more extensive than the city was, until a
late date, rendered impossible. The good and bad
sides of this peculiar phase of civilization have
been often enough commented on by historians.
On the one hand the democratic assembly of such
an imperial city as Athens furnished a school of
political training superior to anything else that
the world has ever seen. It was something like
what the Kew England town-meeting would be if
it were continually required to adjust complicated
questions of international polity, if it were carried

The Federal Union, 73

on in the very centre or point of confluence of all
contemporary streams of culture, and if it were in
the habit every few days of listening to statesmen
and orators like Hamilton or Webster, jurists like
Marshall, generals like Sherman, poets like Lowell,
historians like Parkman. Nothing in all history
has approached the high - wrought intensity and
brilliancy of the political life of Athens.

On the other hand, the smallness of the inde-
pendent city, as a political aggregate, made it of
little or no use in diminishing the liability to per-
petual warfare which is the curse of all primitive
communities. In a group of independent cities,
such as made up the Hellenic world, the tendency
to warfare is almost as strong, and the occasions
for warfare are almost as frequent, as in a con-
geries of mutually hostile tribes of barbarians.
There is something almost lurid in the sharpness
of contrast with which the wonderful height of
humanity attained by Hellas is set off against the
fierce barbarism which characterized the relations
of its cities to one another. It may be laid down
as a general rule that in an early state of society,
where the political aggregations are small, war-
fare is universal and cruel. From the intensity
of the jealousies and rivalries between adjacent
self-governing groups of men, nothing short of

74 Americcm Political Ideas.

chronic warfare can result, until some principle
of union is evolved by which disputes can be
settled in accordance with general principles ad-
mitted by all. Among peoples that have never
risen above the tribal stage of aggregation, such
as the American Indians, war is the normal con-
dition of things, and there is nothing fit to be
called peace, — there are only truces of brief and
uncertain duration. Were it not for this there
would be somewhat less to be said in favour of
great states and kingdoms. As modern life grows
more and more complicated and interdependent,
the Great State subserves innumerable useful pur-
poses; but in the history of civilization its first
service, both in order of time and in order of im-
portance, consists in the diminution of the quanti-
ty of warfare and in the narrowing of its sphere.
For within the territorial limits of any great and
permanent state, the tendency is for warfare to
become the exception and peace the rule. In this
direction the political careers of the Greek cities
assisted the progress of civilization but little.

Under the conditions of Grseco-Roman civic life
there were but two practicable methods of form-
ing a great state and diminishing the quantity
of warfare. The one method was conquest with
incoTjporation, the other method was federation.

The Federal Union, 75

Either one city might conquer all the others and
endew their citizens with its own franchise, or all
the cities might give up part of their sovereignty
to a federal body which should have power to
keep the peace, and should represent the civilized
world of the time in its relations with outlying
barbaric peoples. Of these two methods, obvious-
ly the latter is much the more effective, but it pre-
supposes for its successful adoption a higher gen-
eral state of civilization than the former. Neither
method was adopted by the Greeks in their day
of greatness. The Spartan method of extending
its power was conquest without incorporation :
when Sparta conquered another Greek city, she
sent a harmost to govern it like a tyrant ; in other
words she virtually enslaved the subject city. The
efforts of Athens tended more in the direction of
a peaceful federalism. In the great Delian con-
federacy which developed into the maritime em-
pire of Athens, the ^gean cities were treated
as allies rather than subjects. As regards their
local affairs they were in no way interfered with,
and could they have been represented in some
kind of a federal council at Athens, the course
of Grecian history might have been wonderfully
altered. As it was, they were all deprived of one
essential element of sovereignty, — the power of

76 Americcm Political Ideas.

controlling their own military forces. Some of
them, as Chios and Mitylene, furnished troops
at the demand of Athens; others maintained no
troops, but paid a fixed tribute to Athens in re-
turn for her protection. In either case thej felt
shorn of part of their dignity, though otherwise
they had nothing to complain of ; and during the
Peloponnesian war Athens had to reckon with
their tendency to revolt as well as with her Do-
rian enemies. Such a confederation was naturally
doomed to speedy overthrow.

In the century following the death of Alexan-
der, in the closing age of Hellenic independence,
the federal idea appears in a much more advanced
stage of elaboration, though in a part of Greece
which had been held of little account in the great
days of Athens and Sparta. Between the Achaian
federation, framed in 274 e.g., and the United
States of America, there are some interesting
points of resemblance which have been elaborate-
ly discussed by Mr. Freeman, in his " History of
Federal Government." About the same time the
jEtolian League came into prominence in the
north. Both these leagues were instances of true
federal government, and were not mere confedera-
tions ; that is, the central government acted directly
upon all the citizens and not merely upon the local

The Federal TTnion. 77

governments. Each of these leagues had for its
chief executive officer a General elected for one
year, vrith powers similar to those of an American
President. In each the supreme assembly was a
primary assembly at which every citizen from ev-
ery city of the league had a right to be present, to
speak, and to vote ; but as a natural consequence
these assemblies shrank into comparatively aristo-
cratic bodies. In ^tolia, which was a group of
mountain cantons similar to Switzerland, the fed-
eral union was more complete than in Achaia,
which was a group of cities. In Achaia cases oc-
curred in which a single city was allowed to deal
separately with foreign powers. Here, as in ear-
lier Greek history, the instinct of autonomy was
too powerful to admit of complete /'^deration.
Yet the career of the Achaian League was not an
inglorious one. For nearly a century and a half it
gave the Peloponnesos a larger measure of order-
ly government than the country had ever known
before, without infringing upon local liberties. It
defied successfully the threats and assaults of Ma-
cedonia, and yielded at last only to the all-conquer-
ing might of Rome.

Thus in so far as Greece contributed anything
towards the formation of great and pacific political
aggregates, she did it through attempts dXfederor

78 American Political Ideas.

tion. But in so low a state of political develop-
ment as that which prevailed throughout the Med-
iterranean world in pre-Christian times, the more
barbarous method of conquest with incorporation
was more likely to be successful on a great scale.
This was well illustrated in the history of Kome,
— a civic community of the same generic type
with Sparta and Athens, but presenting specific
differences of the highest importance. The begin-
ings of Rome, unfortunately, are prehistoric. I
have often thought that if some beneficent fairy
could grant us the power of somewhere raising
the veil of oblivion which enshrouds the earliest
ages of Aryan dominion in Europe, there is no
place from which the historian should be more
glad to see it lifted than from Rome in the centu-
ries which saw the formation of the city, and which
preceded the expulsion of the kings. Even the
legends, which were uncritically accepted from the
days of Livy to those of our grandfathers, are pro-
vokingly silent upon the very points as to which
we would fain get at least a hint. This much is
plain, however, that in the embryonic stage of the
Roman commonwealth some obscure processes of
fu&ion or commingling went on. The tribal pop-
ulation of Rome was more heterogeneous than
that of the great cities of Greece, and its earliest

The Federal Union, 79

municipal religion seems to have been an assem-
blage of various tribal religions that had points
of contact with other tribal religions throughout
large portions of the Grseco-Italic world. As M.
de Coulanges observes,* Rome was almost the
only city of antiquity which was not kept apart
from other cities by its religion. There was hard-
ly a people in Greece or Italy which it was re-
strained from admitting to participation in its mu-
nicipal rites.

However this may have been, it is certain that
Rome early succeeded in freeing itself from that
insuperable prejudice which elsewhere prevented
the ancient city from admitting aliens to a share
in its franchise. And in this victory over prime-
val political ideas lay the whole secret of Rome's
mighty career. The victory was not indeed com-
pleted until after the terrible Social War of b.c.
90, but it was begun at least four centuries earlier
with the admission of the plebeians. At the con-
summation of the conquest of Italy in b.c. 270
Roman burghership already extended, in varying
degrees of completeness, through the greater part
of Etruria and Campania, from the coast to the
mountains ; while all the rest of Italy was admitted

* " La Cite Antique," 441.

80 Americcm Political Ideas.

to privileges for which ancient history had else-
where furnished no precedent. Hence the inva>
sion of Hannibal half a century later, even with
its stupendous victories of Thrasymene and Can-
nae, effected nothing toward detaching the Italian
subjects from their allegiance to Rome ; and herein
we have a most instructive contrast to the conduct
of the communities subject to Athens at several
critical moments of the Peloponuesian War. With
this consolidation of Italy, thus triumphantly de-
monstrated, the whole problem of the conquering
career of Rome was solved. All that came after-
wards was simply a corollary from this. The con-
centration of all the fighting power of the pen-
insula into the hands of the ruling city formed
a stronger political aggregate than anything the
world had as yet seen. It was not only proof
against the efforts of the greatest military genius
of antiquity, but whenever it was brought into
conflict with the looser organizations of Greece,
Africa, and Asia, or with the semi-barbarous tribes
of Spain and Gaul, the result of the struggle was
virtually predetermined. The universal dominion
of Rome was inevitable, so soon as the political
union of Italy had been accomplished. Among
the Romans themselves there were those who thor-
oughly understood this point, as we may see from

The Federal Union. 81

the interesting speech of the emperor Claudius in
favour of admitting Gauls to the senate.

The benefits conferred upon the world by the
universal dominion of Rome were of quite inesti-
mable value. First of these benefits, and (as it
were) the material basis of the others, was the pro-
longed peace that was enforced throughout large
portions of the world where chronic warfare had
hitherto prevailed. The jpax romcma has perhaps
been sometimes depicted in exaggerated colours;
but as compared with all that had preceded, and
with all that followed, down to the beginning of
the nineteenth century, it deserved the encomiums
it has received. The second benefit was the min-
gling and mutual destruction of the primitive tri-
bal and municipal religions, thus clearing the way
for Christianity, — a step which, regarded from a
purely political point of view, was of immense im-
portance for the further consolidation of society
in Europe. The third benefit was the develop-
ment of the Koman law into a great body of legal
precepts and principles leavened throughout with
ethical principles of universal applicability, and the
gradual substitution of this Roman law for the in-
numerable local usages of ancient communities.
Thus arose the idea of a common Christendom, of
a brotherhood of peoples associated both by com-

6

82 Americcm Political Ideas.

mon beliefs regarding the unseen world and by
common principles of action in the daily affairs of
life. The common ethical and traditional basis
thus established for the future development of the
great nationalities of Europe is the most funda-
mental characteristic distinguishing modern from
ancient history.

While, however, it secured these benefits for
mankind for all time to come, the Koman political
system in itself was one which could not possibly
endure. That extension of the franchise which
made Rome's conquests possible, was, after all, the
extension of a franchise which could only be prac-
tically enjoyed within the walls of the imperial
city itself. From first to last the device of repre-
sentation was never thought of, and from first to
last the Roman comitia remained a primary assem-
bly. The result was that, as the burgherhood en-
larged, the assembly became a huge mob as little
fitted for the transaction of public business as a
town-meeting of all the inhabitants of New York
would be. The functions which in Athens were
performed by the assembly were accordingly in
Rome performed largely by the aristocratic sen-
ate; and for the conflicts consequently arising be-
tween the senatorial and the popular parties it was
difficult to find any adequate constitutional check.

The Federal Union. 83

Outside of Italy, moreover, in the absence of a rep-
resentative system, the Roman government was
a despotism which, whether more or less oppres-
sive, could in the nature of things be nothing else
than a despotism. But nothing is more danger-
ous for a free people than the attempt to govern
a dependent people despotically. The bad govern-
ment kills out the good government as surely as
slave-labour destroys free-labour, or as a debased
currency drives out a sound currency. The exist-
ence of proconsuls in the provinces, with great ar-
mies at their beck and call, brought about such
results as might have been predicted, as soon as
the growing anarchy at home furnished a valid ex-
cuse for armed interference. In the case of the
Roman world, however, the result is not to be de-
plored, for it simply substituted a government that
was practicable under the circumstances for one
that had become demonstrably impracticable.

As regards the provinces the change from sen-
atorial to imperial government at Rome was a
great gain, inasmuch as it substituted an orderly
and responsible administration for irregular and
irresponsible extortion. For a long time, too, it
was no part of the imperial policy to interfere with
local customs and privileges. But, in the absence
of a representative system, the centralizing ten-

84 American Political Ideas.

dency inseparable from the position of such a
government proved to be irresistible. And the
strength of this centralizing tendency was further
enhanced by the military character of the govern-
ment which was necessitated by perpetual fron-
tier warfare against the barbarians. As year after
year went by, the provincial towns and cities were
governed less and less by their local magistrates,
more and more by prefects responsible to the em-
peror only. There were other co-operating causes,
economical and social, for the decline of the em-
pire ; but this change alone, which was consum-
mated by the time of Diocletian, was quite enough
to burn out the candle of Roman strength at both
ends. "With the decrease in the power of the lo-
cal governments came an increase in the burdens
of taxation and conscription that were laid upon
them."^ And as " the dislocation of commerce and
industry caused by the barbarian inroads, and
the increasing demands of the central adminis-
tration for the payment of its countless officials
and the maintenance of its troops, all went to-
gether," the load at last became greater "than
human nature could endure." By the time of the
great invasions of the fifth century, local politi-

* Arnold, "Roman Provincial Administration," 237.

The Federal Union. 85

cal life had gone far towards extinction through-
out Roman Europe, and the tribal organization of
the Teutons prevailed in the struggle simply be-
cause it had come to be politically stronger than
any organization that was left to oppose it.

We have now seen how the two great political
systems that were founded upon the Ancient City
both ended in failure, though both achieved enor-
mous and lasting results. And we have seen how
largely both these political failures were due to
the absence of the principle of representation
from the public life of Greece and Home. The
chief problem of civilization, from the political
point of view, has always been how to secure con-
certed action among men on a great scale without
sacrificing local independence. The ancient his-
tory of Europe shows that it is not possible to
solve this problem without the aid of the princi-
ple of representation. Greece, until overcome by
external force, sacredly maintained local self-gov-
ernment, but in securing permanent concert of
action it was conspicuously unsuccessful. Rome
secured concert of action on a gigantic scale, and
transformed the thousand unconnected tribes and
cities it conquered into an organized European
world, but in doing this it went far towards ex-
tinguishing local self-government. The advent of

86 Americcm Political Ideas,

the Teutons upon the scene seems therefore to
have been necessary, if only to supply the indis-
pensable element without which the dilemma of
civilization could not be surmounted. The tur-
bulence of Europe during the Teutonic migra-
tions was so great and so long continued, that on
a superficial view one might be excused for re-
garding the good work of Rome as largely un-
done. And in the feudal isolation of effort and
apparent incapacity for combined action which
characterized the different parts of Europe after
the downfall of the Carolingian empire, it might
well have seemed that political society had reverted
towards a primitive type of structure. In truth,
however, the retrogradation was much slighter
than appeared on the surface. Feudalism itself,
with its curious net-work of fealties and obliga-
tions running through the fabric of society in
every direction, was by no means purely disinte-
grative in its tendencies. The mutual relations
of rival baronies were by no means like those of
rival clans or tribes in pre -Roman days. The
central power of Rome, though no longer exert-
ed politically through curators and prefects, was
no less effective in the potent hands of the clergy
and in the traditions of the imperial jurisprudence
by which the legal ideas of mediaeval society were

The Federal Union. 87

go strongly coloured. So powerful, indeed, was
this twofold influence of Rome, that in the later
Middle Ages, when the modern nationalities had
fairly taken shape, it was the capacity for local
self-government — in spite of all the Teutonic re-
inforcement it had had — that had suffered much
more than the capacity for national consolidation.
Among the great modern nations it was only Eng-
land— which in its political development had re-
mained more independent of the Roman law and
the Roman church than even the Teutonic father-
land itself — it was only England that came out of
the mediaeval crucible with its Teutonic self-gov-
ernment substantially intact. On the main-land
only two little spots, at the two extremities of the
old Teutonic world, had fared equally well. At
the mouth of the Rhine the little Dutch commu-
nities were prepared to lead the attack in the ter-
rible battle for freedom with which the drama of
modern history was ushered in. In the impreg-
nable mountain fastnesses of upper Germany the
Swiss cantons had bid defiance alike to Austrian
tyrant and to Burgundian invader, and had pre-
served in its purest form the rustic democracy
of their Aryan forefathers. By a curious coinci-
dence, both these free peoples, in their efforts to-
wards national unity^ were led to frame federal

88 Americcm Political Ideas.

unions, and one of these political achievements is,
from the stand-point of universal history, of very
great significance. The old League of High Ger-
many, which earned immortal renown at Morgarten
and Sempach, consisted of German-speaking can-
tons only. But in the fifteenth century the League
won by force of arms a small bit of Italian terri-
tory about Lake Lugano, and in the sixteenth the
powerful city of Bern annexed the Burgundian
bishopric of Lausanne and rescued the free city
of Geneva from the clutches of the Duke of
Savoy. Other Burgundian possessions of Savoy
were seized by the canton of Freiburg ; and after
awhile all these subjects and allies were admitted
on equal terms into the confederation. The re-
sult is that modern Switzerland is made up of
what might seem to be most discordant and un-
manageable elements. Four languages — German,
French, Italian, and Ehsetian — are spoken within
the limits of the confederacy ; and in point of i^e-
ligion the cantons are sharply divided as Catholic
and Protestant. Yet in spite of all this, Switzer-
land is as thoroughly united in feeling as any
nation in Europe. To the German-speaking Cath-
olic of Altdorf the German Catholics of Bavaria
are foreigners, while the French-speaking Protes-
tants of Geneva are fellow-countrymen. Deeper

The Federal Union. 89

down even than these deep-seated differences of
speech and creed lies the feeling that comes from
the common possession of a political freedom that
is greater than that possessed by surrounding peo-
ples. Such has been the happy outcome of the
first attempt at federal union made by men of
Teutonic descent. Complete independence in
local affairs, when combined with adequate repre-
sentation in the federal council, has effected such
an intense cohesion of interests throughout the
nation as no centralized government, however cun-
ningly devised, could ever have secured.

Until the nineteenth century, however, the fed-
eral form of government had given no clear indi-
cation of its capacity for holding together great
bodies of men, spread over vast territorial areas,
in orderly and peaceful relations with one anoth-
er. The empire of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius
still remained the greatest known example of polit-
ical aggregation ; and men who argued from sim-
ple historic precedent without that power of analy-
zing precedents which the comparative method has
supplied, came not unnaturally to the conclusions
that great political aggregates have an inherent
tendency towards breaking up, and that great po-
litical aggregates cannot be maintained except by
a strongly - centralized administration and at the

90 Americcm Political Ideas.

sacrifice of local self-government. A century ago
the very idea of a stable federation of forty power-
ful states, covering a territory nearly equal in area
to the whole of Europe, carried on by a republi-
can government elected by universal suffrage, and
guaranteeing to every tiniest village its full meed
of local independence, — the very idea of all this
would have been scouted as a thoroughly imprac-
ticable Utopian dream. And such scepticism would
have been quite justifiable, for European history
did not seem to afford any precedents upon which
such a forecast of the future could be logically
based. Between the various nations of Europe
there has certainly always existed an element of
political community, bequeathed by the Koman em-
pire, manifested during the Middle Ages in a com-
mon relationship to the Church, and in modern times
in a common adherence to certain uncodified rules
of international law, more or less imperfectly de-
fined and enforced. Between England and Spain,
for example, or between France and Austria, there
has never been such utter political severance as ex-
isted normally between Greece and Persia, or Eome
and Carthage. But this community of political
inheritance in Europe, it is needless to say, falls
very far short of the degree of community implied
in a federal union; and so great is the diversity

The Federal Union. 91

of language and of creed, and of local historic de-
velopment with the deep-seated prejudices attend-
ant thereupon, that the formation of a European
federation could hardly be looked for except as
the result of mighty though quiet and subtle in-
fluences operating for a long time from without.
From what direction, and in what manner, such
an irresistible though perfectly pacific pressure is
likely to be exerted in the future, I shall endeav-
our to show in my next lecture. At present we
have to observe that the experiment of federal
union on a grand scale required as its conditions,
firsty a vast extent of unoccupied country which
could be settled without much warfare by men of
the same race and speech, and secondly^ on the
part of the settlers, a rich inheritance of political
training such as is afforded by long ages of self-
government. The Atlantic coast of North Amer-
ica, easily accessible to Europe, yet remote enough
to be freed from the political complications of the
old world, furnished the first of these conditions :
the history of the English people through fifty
generations furnished the second. It was through
English self-government, as I argued in my first
lecture, that England alone, among the great na-
tions of Europe, was able to found durable and
self-supporting colonies. I have now to add that

92 American Political Ideas.

it was only England, among all the great nations
of Europe, that could send forth colonists capable
of dealing successfully with the difficult problem
of forming such a political aggregate as the Unit-
ed States have become. For obviously the pres-
ervation of local self-government is essential to the
very idea of a federal union. Without the Town-
Meeting, or its equivalent in some form or other,
the Federal Union would become ijpso facto con-
verted into a centralizing imperial government.
Should anything of tliis sort ever happen — should
American towns ever come to be ruled by prefects
appointed at Washington, and should American
States ever become like the administrative depart-
ments of France, or even like the counties of
England at the present day — then the time will
have come when men may safely predict the
break-up of the American political system by
reason of its overgrown dimensions and the diver-
sity of interests between its parts. States so un-
like one another as Maine and Louisiana and Cal-
ifornia cannot be held together by the stiff bonds
of a centralizing government. The durableness
of the federal union lies in its flexibility, and it is
this flexibility which makes it the only kind of
government, according to modern ideas, that is
permanently applicable to a whole continent. If

The Federal Union. 93

the United States were to-day a consolidated re-
public like France, recent events in California
might have disturbed the peace of the country.
But in the federal union, if California, as a state
sovereign within its own sphere, adopts a gro-
tesque constitution that aims at infringing on the
rights of capitalists, the other states are not di-
rectly affected. They may disapprove, but they
have neither the right nor the desire to interfere.
Meanwhile the laws of nature quietly operate to
repair the blunder. Capital flows away from Cal-
ifornia, and the business of the state is damaged,
until presently the ignorant demagogues lose fa-
vour, the silly constitution becomes a dead-letter,
and its formal repeal begins to be talked of. ISTot
the smallest ripple of excitement disturbs the pro-
found peace of the country at large. It is in this
complete independence that is preserved by every
state, in all matters save those in which the feder-
al principle itself is concerned, that we find the
surest guaranty of the permanence of the Ameri-
can political system. Obviously no race of men,
save the race to which habits of self-government
and the skilful use of political representation had
come to be as second nature, could ever have suc-
ceeded in founding such a system.

Yet even by men of English race, working with-

94 American Political Ideas.

out let or hinderance from any foreign source, and
with the better part of a continent at their dis-
posal for a field to work in, so great a political
problem as that of the American Union has not
been solved without much toil and trouble. The
great puzzle of civilization — how to secure perma-
nent concert of action without sacrificing indepen-
dence of action — is a puzzle which has taxed the
ingenuity of Americans as well as of older Aryan
peoples. In the year 1788 when our Federal Union
was completed, the problem had already occupied
the minds of American statesmen for a century
and a half, — that is to say, ever since the English
settlement of Massachusetts. In 1643 a New Eng-
land confederation was formed between Massachu-
setts and Connecticut, together with Plymouth
since merged in Massachusetts and New Haven
since merged in Connecticut. The confederation
was formed for defence against the French in Can-
ada, the Dutch on the Hudson river, and the In-
dians. But owing simply to the inequality in the
sizes of these colonies — Massachusetts more than
outweighing the other three combined — the prac-
tical working of this confederacy was never very
successful. In 1754, just before the outbreak of
the great war which drove the French from Amer-
ica, a general Congress of the colonies was held at

The Federal Union. 95

Albany, and a comprehensive scheme of union
was proposed by Benjamin Franklin, but nothing
came of the project at that time. The commercial
rivalry between the colonies, and their disputes
over boundary lines, were then quite like the sim-
ilar phenomena with which Europe had so long
been familiar. In 1756 Georgia and South Caro-
lina actually came to blows over the navigation of
the Savannah river. The idea that the thirteen
colonies could ever overcome their mutual jeal-
ousies so far as to unite in a single political body,
was received at that time in England with a deri-
sion like that which a proposal for a permanent
federation of European States would excite in
many minds to-day. It was confidently predicted
that if the common allegiance to the British crown
were once withdrawn, the colonies would forth-
with proceed to destroy themselves with interne-
cine war. In fact, however, it was the shaking off
of allegiance to the British crown, and the com-
mon trials and sufferings of the war of indepen-
dence, that at last welded the colonies together
and made a federal union possible. As it was,
the union was consummated only by degrees. By
the Articles of Confederation, agreed on by Con-
gress in 1777 but not adopted by all the States
until 1781, the federal government acted only upon

96 American Political Ideas.

the several state governments and not directly
upon individuals; there was no federal judiciary
for the decision of constitutional questions aris-
ing out of the relations between the states; and
the Congress was not provided with any eflScient
means of raising a revenue or of enforcing its leg-
islative decrees. Under such a government the
difficulty of insuring concerted action was so great
that, but for the transcendent personal qualities
of Washington, the bungling mismanagement of
the British ministry, and the timely aid of the
French fleet, the war of independence would most
likely have ended in failure. After the indepen-
dence of the colonies was acknowledged, the for-
mation of a more perfect union was seen to be the
only method of securing peace and making a na-
tion which should be respected by foreign powers ;
and so in 1788, after much discussion, the present
Constitution of the United States was adopted, —
a constitution which satisfied very few people at
the time, and which was from beginning to end a
series of compromises, yet which has proved in its
working a masterpiece of political wisdom.

The first great compromise answered to the ini-
tial difficulty of securing approximate equality of
weight in the federal councils between states of
unequal size. The simple device by which this

The Federal Union. 97

difficulty was at last surmounted has proved effect-
ual, although the inequalities between the states
have greatly increased. To-day the population of
New York is more than eighty times that of Ne-
vada. In area the state of Ehode Island is small-
er than Montenegro, while the state of Texas is
larger than the Austrian empire with Bavaria and
Wurtemberg thrown in. Yet New York and Ne-
vada, Rhode Island and Texas, each send two sen-
ators to Washington, while on the other hand in
the lower house each state has a number of rep-
resentatives proportioned to its population. The
upper house of Congress is therefore a federal
while the lower house is a national body, and the
government is brought into direct contact with
the people without endangering the equal rights
of the several states.

The second great compromise of the American
constitution consists in the series of arrangements
by which sovereignty is divided between the states
and the federal government. In all domestic leg-
islation and jurisdiction, civil and criminal, in all
matters relating to tenure of property, marriage
and divorce, the fulfilment of contracts and the
punishment of malefactors, each separate state is
as completely a sovereign state as France or Great
Britain. In speaking to a British audience a cod

^8 American Political Ideas.

Crete illustration may not be superfluous. If a
criminal is condemned to death in Pennsylvania,
the royal prerogative of pardon resides in the
Governor of Pennsylvania : the President of the
United States has no more authority in the case
than the Czar of Russia. Nor in civil cases can
an appeal lie from the state courts to the Supreme
Court of the United States, save where express
provision has been made in the Constitution.
Within its own sphere the state is supreme. The
chief attributes of sovereignty with which the sev-
eral states have parted are the coining of money,
the carrying of mails, the imposition of tariff dues,
the granting of patents and copyrights, the dec-
laration of war, and the maintenance of a navy.
The regular army is supported and controlled by
the federal government, but each state maintains
its own militia which it is bound to use in case of
internal disturbance before calling upon the cen-
tral government for aid. In time of war, however,
these militias come under the control of the cen-
tral government. Thus every American citizen
lives under two governments, the functions of
which are clearly and intelligibly distinct.

To insure the stability of the federal union thus
formed, the Constitution created a "system of
United States courts extending throughout the

The Federal Union. 99

states, empowered to define the boundaries of
federal authority, and to enforce its decisions by
federal power." This omnipresent federal judi-
ciary was undoubtedly the most important creation
of the statesmen who framed the Constitution.
The closely-knit relations which it established be-
tween the states contributed powerfully to the
growth of a feeling of national solidarity through-
out the whole country. The United States to-
day cling together with a coherency far greater
than the coherency of any ordinary federation or
league. Yet the primary aspect of the federal
Constitution was undoubtedly that of a perma-
nent league, in which each state, while retaining
its domestic sovereignty intact, renounced forever
its right to make war upon its neighbours and
relegated its international interests to the care
of a central council in which all the states were
alike represented and a central tribunal endowed
with purely judicial functions of interpretation.
It was the first attempt in the history of the world
to apply on a grand scale to the relations between
states the same legal methods of procedure which,
as long applied in all civilized countries to the re-
lations between individuals, have rendered private
warfare obsolete. And it was so far successful
tliat, during a period of seventy-two years in which

100 Americcm Political Ideas.

the United States increased fourfold in extent,
tenfold in population, and more than tenfold in
wealth and power, the federal union maintained
a state of peace more profound than the j[)ax ro-
mana.

Twenty years ago this unexampled state of peace
was suddenly interrupted by a tremendous war,
which in its results, however, has served only to
bring out with fresh emphasis the pacific implica-
tions of federalism. With the eleven revolted
states at first completely conquered and then re-
instated with full rights "and privileges in the fed-
eral union, with their people accepting in good
faith the results of the contest, with their leaders
not executed as traitors but admitted again to seats
in Congress and in the Cabinet, and with all this
accomplished without any violent constitutional
changes, — I think we may fairly claim that the
strength of the pacific implications of federalism
has been more strikingly demonstrated than if
there had been no war at all. Certainly the world
never beheld such a spectacle before. In my next
and concluding lecture I shall return to this point
while summing up the argument and illustrating
the part played by the English race in the general
history of civilization.

m.

''MANIFEST destiny:'

Among the legends of our late Civil War there
is a story of a dinner-party given by the Ameri-
cans residing in Paris, at which were propounded
sundry toasts concerning not so much the past and
present as the expected glories of the great Amer-
ican nation. In the general character of these
toasts geographical considerations were very prom-
inent, and the principal fact which seemed to oc-
cupy the minds of the speakers was the unprece-
dented bigness of onr country. "Here's to the
United States," said the first speaker, "bounded
on the north by British America, on the south by
the Gulf of Mexico, on the east by the Atlantic,
and on the west by the Pacific, Ocean." " But,"
said the second speaker, " this is far too limited a
view of the subject : in assigning our boundaries
we must look to the great and glorious future
which is prescribed for us by the Manifest Destiny
of the Anglo-Saxon Race. Here's to the United
States, — bounded on the north by the North Pole,

102 American Political Ideas.

on the south hj t]ie South Pole, on the east bj the
dsing an-dl Q;ii.tii0 west by the setting sun." Em-
phatic appjause- greeted tliis aspiring prophecy.
Bu>ibpre'ar-o^e the third speaker — a very serious
gentleman from the Far West. " If we are going,"
said this truly patriotic American, " to leave the
historic past and present, and take our manifest
destiny into the account, why restrict ourselves
within the narrow limits assigned by our fellow-
countryman who has just sat down ? I give you
the United States, — bounded on the north by the
Aurora Borealis, on the south by the precession of
the equinoxes, on the east by the primeval chaos,
and on the west by the Day of Judgment !"

I offer this anecdote at the outset by way of
self-defence, inasmuch as I shall by and by have
myself to introduce some considerations concern-
ing the future of our country, and of what some
people, without the fear of Mr. Freeman before
their eyes, call the "Anglo-Saxon" race; and if it
should happen to strike you that my calculations
are unreasonably large, I hope you will remember
that they are quite modest after all, when com-
pared with some others.

The " manifest destiny " of the " Anglo-Saxon "
race and the huge dimensions of our country are
favourite topics with Fourth-of-July orators, but

''Manifest Destiny:'' 103

they are Done the less interesting on that account
when considered from the point of view of the his-
torian. To be a citizen of a great and growing
state, or to belong to one of the dominant races
of the world, is no doubt a legitimate source of
patriotic pride, though there is perhaps an equal
justification for such a feeling in being a citizen
of a tiny state like Holland, which, in spite of
its small dimensions, has nevertheless achieved so
much, — fighting at one time the battle of freedom
for the world, producing statesmen like William
and Barneveldt, generals like Maurice, scholars
like Erasmus and Grotius, and thinkers like Spi-
noza, and taking the lead even to-day in the study
of Christianity and in the interpretation of the
Bible. But my course in the present lecture is
determined by historical or. philosophical rather
than by patriotic interest, and I shall endeavour to
characterize and group events as impartiallj^ as if
my home were at Leyden in the Old World in-
stead of Cambridge in the N^ew.

First of all, I shall take sides with Mr. Freeman
in eschewing altogether the word "Anglo-Saxon."
The term is sufficiently absurd and misleading as
applied in England to the Old-English speech of
our forefathers, or to that portion of English his-
tory which is included between the fifth and the

104 American Political Ideas.

eleventh centuries. But in America it is frequent-
ly used, not indeed by scholars, but by popular
writers and speakers, in a still more loose and slov-
enly way. In the war of independence our great-
great-grandfathers, not yet having ceased to think
of themselves as Englishmen, used to distinguish
themselves as "Continentals," while the king's
troops were known as the "British." The quaint
term " Continental " long ago fell into disuse, ex-
cept in the slang phrase " not worth a Continen-
tal" which referred to the debased condition of
our currency at the close of the Kevolutionary
War ; but " American " and " British " might still
serve the purpose sufficiently whenever it is nec-
essary to distinguish between the two great Eng-
lish nationalities. The term " English," however,
is so often used with sole reference to people and
things in England as to have become in some meas-
ure antithetical to "American;" and when it is
found desirable to include the two in a general
expression, one often hears in America the term
"Anglo-Saxon " colloquially employed for this pur-
pose. A more slovenly use of language can hard-
ly be imagined. Such a compound term as "An-
glo-American " might perhaps be logically defensi-
ble, but that has already become restricted to the
English-descended inhabitants of tlie United States

''Manifest Destiny P 105

and Canada alone, in distinction from Spanish
Americans and red Indians. It is never so used
as to include Englishmen. Refraining from all
such barbarisms, I prefer to call the English race
by the name which it has always applied to itself,
from the time when it inhabited the little district
of Angel n on the Baltic coast of Sleswick down to
the time when it had begun to spread itself over
three great continents. It is a race which has
shown a rare capacity for absorbing slightly for-
eign elements and moulding them into conformity
with a political type that was first wrought out
through centuries of effort on British soil; and
this capacity it has shown perhaps in a heightened
degree in the peculiar circumstances in which it
has been placed in America. The American has-^
absorbed considerable quantities of closely kindred
European blood, but he is rapidly assimilating it
all, and in his political habits and aptitudes he re-
mains as thoroughly English as his forefathers in
the days of De Montfort, or Hampden, or Wash-
ington. Premising this, we may go on to consider
some aspects of the work which the English race
has done and is doing in the world, and we need
not feel discouraged if, in order to do justice to
the subject, we have to take our start far back in
ancient history. We shall begin, it may be said,

106 American Political Ideas.

•A

somewhere near the primeval chaos, and though
we shall indeed stop short of the day of judgment,
we shall hope at all events to reach the millen-
nium. '

Our eloquent friends of the Paris dinner-party
seem to have been strongly impressed with the
excellence of enormous political aggregates. We,
too, approaching the subject from a different point
of view, have been led to see how desirable it is
that self-governing groups of men should be en-
abled to work together in permanent harmony and
on a great scale. In this kind of political integra-
tion the work of civilization very largely consists.
We have seen how in its most primitive form po-
litical society is made up of small self-governing
groups that are perpetually at war with one an-
other. Now the process of change which we call
civilization means quite a number of things. But
there is no doubt that on its political side it means
primarily the gradual substitution of a state of
peace for a state of war. This change is the con-
dition precedent for all the other kinds of improve-
ment that are connoted by such a term as " civili-
zation." Manifestly the development of industry
is largely dependent upon the cessation or restric-
tion of warfare ; and furthermore, as the industrial
phase of civilization slowly supplants the military

^'Mcmifest Destiny?^ 107

phase, men's characters undergo, though very slow-
ly, a corresponding change. Men become less in-
clined to destroy life or to inflict pain ; or — to use
the popular terminology which happens here to
coincide precisely with that of the Doctrine of
Evolution — they become less brutal and more
humane. Obviously then the prime feature of the
process called civilization is the general diminu-
tion of warfare. But we have seen that a general
diminution of warfare is rendered possible only
by the union of small political groups into larger
groups that are kept together by community of
interests, and that can adjust their mutual rela-
tions by legal discussion without coming to blows.
In the preceding lecture we considered this proc-
ess of political integration as variously exempli-
fied by communities of Hellenic, of Roman, and
of Teutonic race, and we saw how manifold were
the difficulties which the process had to encoun-
ter. We saw how the Teutons — at least in Switzer-
land, England, and America — had succeeded best
through the retention of local self-government com-
bined with central representation. We saw how
the Romans failed of ultimate success because by
weakening self-government they weakened that
community of interest which is essential to the
permanence of a great political aggregate. We

108 AmeriGcm Political Ideas.

saw how the Greeks, after passing through theii
most glorious period in a state of chronic warfare,
had begun to achieve considerable success in form-
ing a pacific federation when their independent
career was suddenly cut short by the Koman con-
queror.

This last example introduces us to a fresh con-
sideration, of very great importance. It is not
only that every progressive community has had to
solve, in one way or another, the problem of se-
curing permanent concert of action without sacri-
ficing local independence of action ; but while en-
gaged in this difficult work the community has
had to defend itself against the attacks of other
communities. In the case just cited, of the con-
quest of Greece by Rome, little harm was done
perhaps. But under different circumstances im-
mense damage may have been done in this way,
and the nearer we go to the beginnings of civiliza-
tion the greater the danger. At the dawn of his-
tory we see a few brilliant points of civilization
surrounded on every side by a midnight blackness
of barbarism. In order that the pacific communi-
ty may be able to go on doing its work, it must be
strong enough and warlike enough to overcome
its barbaric neighbours who have no notion what-
ever of keeping peace. This is another of the

^''Manifest Destmy.^^ 109

seeming paradoxes of the history of civih'zation,
that for a very long time the possibility of peace
can be guaranteed only through war. Obviously
the permanent peace of the world can be secured
only through the gradual concentration of the pre-
ponderant military strength into the hands of the
most pacific communities. With infinite toil and
trouble this point has been slowly gained by man-
kind, through the circumstance that the very same
political aggregation of small primitive communi-
ties which makes them less disposed to quarrel
among themselves tends also to make them more
than a match for the less coherent groups of their
more barbarous neighbours. The same concert of
action which tends towards internal harmony tends
also towards external victory, and both ends are
promoted by the co-operation of the same sets of
causes. But for a long time all the political prob-
lems of the civilized world were complicated by
the fact that the community had to fight for its
life. We seldom stop to reflect upon the immi-
nent danger from outside attacks, whether from
surrounding barbarism or from neighbouring civ-
ilizations of lower type, amid which the rich and
high-toned civilizations of Greece and Rome were
developed. When the king of Persia undertook
to reduce Greece to the condition of a Persian sat-

no American Political Ideas.

rapy, there was imminent danger that all the enor-
mous fruition of Greek thought in the intellectual
life of the European world might have been nipped
in the bud. And who can tell how often, in pre-
historic times, some little gleam of civilization,
less bright and steady than this one had become,
may have been quenched in slavery or massacre ?
The greatest work which the Romans performed
in the world was to assume the aggressive against
menacing barbarism, to subdue it, to tame it, and
to enlist its brute force on the side of law and or-
der. This was a murderous work, and in doing
it the Romans became excessively cruel, but it had
to be done by some one before you could expect
to have great and peaceful civilizations like our
own. The warfare of Rome is by no means ade-
y^ quately explained by the theory of a deliberate im-
moral policy of aggression, — "infernal," I believe,
is the stronger adjective which Dr. Draper uses.
The aggressive wars of Rome were largely dictated
by just such considerations as those which a cen-
tury ago made it necessary for the English to put
down the raids of the Scotch Highlanders, and
which have since made it necessary for Russia to
subdue the Caucasus. It is not easy for a turbu-
lent community to live next to an orderly one
without continually stirring up frontier disturb-

^'Manifest Destiny.''^ Ill

ances which call for stern repression from the or-
derly community. Such considerations go far to-
wards explaining the military history of the Eo-
mans, and it is a history with which, on the whole,
we ought to sympathize. In its European relations
that history is the history of the moving of the
civilized frontier northward and eastward against
the disastrous encroachments of barbarous peoples.
This great movement has, on the whole, been stead-
ily kept up, in spite of some apparent fluctuation
in the fifth and sixth centuries of the Christian era,
and it is still going on to-day. It was a great gain
for civilization when the Romans overcame the
Keltiberians of Spain, and taught them good man-
ners and the Latin language, and made it for their
interest hereafter to fight against barbarians. The
third European peninsula was thus won over to
the side of law and order. Danger now remained
on the north. The Gauls had once sacked the city
of Rome ; hordes of Teutons had lately menaced
the very heart of civilization, but had been over-
thrown in murderous combat by Caius Marius;
another great Teutonic movement, led by Ariovis-
tus, now threatened to precipitate the whole bar-
baric force of south-eastern Gaul upon the civil-
ized world; and so it occurred to the prescient
genius of Caesar to be beforehand and conquer

112 American Political Ideas.

Gaal, and enlist all its giant barbaric force on the
side of civilization. This great work was as thor-
oughly done as anything that was ever done in
human history, and we ought to be thankful to
Caesar for it every day that we live. The frontier
to be defended against barbarism was now moved
away up to the Rhine, and was very much short-
ened ; but above all, the Gauls were made to feel
themselves to be Romans. Their country became
one of the chief strongholds of civilization and of
Christianity ; and when the frightful shock of bar-
barism came — the most formidable blow that has
ever been directed by barbaric brute force against
European civilization — it was in Gaul that it was
repelled and that its force was spent. At the be-
ginning of the fifth century an enormous horde of
yellow Mongolians, known as Huns, poured down
into Europe with avowed intent to burn and de-
stroy all the good work which Rome had wrought
in the world ; and terrible was the havoc they ef-
fected in the course of fifty years. If At til a had
carried his point, it has been thought that the
work of European civilization might have had to
be begun over again. But near Chalons-on-the-
Marne, in the year 451, in one of the most obsti-
nate struggles of which history preserves the rec-
ord, the career of the " Scourge of God " was ar-

"Manifest Destiny:' 113

rested, and mainly by the prowess of Gauls and of
Yisigoths whom the genius of Rome had tamed.
That was the last day on which barbarism was able
to contend with civilization on equal terms. It
was no doubt a critical day for all future history ;
and for its favourable issue we must largely thank
the policy adopted by Caesar five centuries before.
By the end of the eighth century the great power
of the Franks had become enlisted in behalf of
law and order, and the Roman throne was occu-
pied by a Frank, — the ablest man who had appear-
ed in the world since Caesar's death ; and one of
the worthiest achievements of Charles the Great
was the conquest and conversion of pagan Ger-
many, which threw the frontier against barbarism
eastward as far as the Oder, and made it so much
the easier to defend Europe. In the thirteenth
century this frontier was permanently carried for-
ward to the Vistula by the Teutonic Knights who,
under commission from the emperor Frederick II.,
overcame the heathen Prussians and Lithuanians;
and now it began to be shown how greatly the
military strength of Europe had increased. In this
same century Batu, the grandson of Jinghis Khan,
came down into Europe with a horde of more than
a million Mongols, and tried to repeat the experi-
ment of Attila. Batu penetrated as far as Silesia,

114 Atiwrica/rh Political Ideas.

and won a great battle at Liegnitz in 1241, but in
spite of his victor}^ he had to desist from the task
of conquering Europe. Since the fifth century the
physical power of the civilized world had grown
immensely ; and the impetus of this barbaric in-
vasion was mainly spent upon Russia, the growth
of which it succeeded in retarding for more than
two centuries. Finally since the sixteenth century
we have seen the Russians, redeemed from their
Mongolian oppressors, and rich in many of the
elements of a vigorous national life, — we have
seen the Russians resume the aggressive in this
conflict of ages, beginning to do for Central Asia
in some sort what the Romans did for Europe.
The frontier against barbarism, which Caesar left
at the Rhine, has been carried eastward to the Vol-
ga, and is now advancing even to the Oxus. Tlie
question has sometimes been raised whether it
would be possible for European civilization to be
seriously threatened by any future invasion of bar-
barism or of some lower type of civilization. By
barbarism certainly not: all the nomad strength
of Mongolian Asia would throw itself in vain
against the insuperable barrier constituted by Rus-
sia. But I have heard it quite seriously suggested
that if some future Attila or Jinghis were to wield
as a unit the entire military strength of the four

^^ Manifest DestinyP 115

hundred millions of Chinese, possessed with some
suddenly-conceived idea of conquering the world,
even as Omar and Abderrahman wielded as a unit
the newly-welded power of the Saracens in the
seventh and eighth centuries, then perhaps a stag-
gering blow might yet be dealt against European
civilization. I will not waste precious time in con-
sidering this imaginary case, further than to re-
mark that if the Chinese are ever going to try any-
thing of this sort, they cannot afford to wait very
long ; for within another century, as we shall pres-
ently see, their very numbers will be surpassed by
those of the English race alone. By that time all
the elements of military predominance on the
earth, including that of simple numerical superi-
ority, will have been gathered into the hands not
merely of men of European descent in general,
but more specifically into the hands of the off-
spring of the Teutonic tribes who conquered Brit-
ain in the fifth century. So far as the relations of
civilization with barbarism are concerned to-day,
the only serious question is by what process of
modification the barbarous races are to maintain
their foothold upon the earth at all. While once
such people threatened the very continuance of
civilization, they now exist only on sufferance.
In this brief survey of the advancing frontier of

116 Americcm Political Ideas.

European civilization, I have said nothing about
the danger that has from time to time been threat-
ened by the followers of Mohammed, — of the over-
throw of the Saracens in Gaul by the grandfather
of Charles the Great, or their overthrow at Con-
stantinople by the image-breaking Leo, of the great
mediaeval Crusades, or of the mischievous but fu-
tile career of the Turks. For if I were to attempt
to draw this outline with anything like complete-
ness, I should have no room left for the conclusion
of my argument. Considering my position thus
far as sufficiently illustrated, let us go on to con-
template for a moment some of the effects of all
this secular turmoil upon the political develop-
ment of the progressive nations of Europe. I
think we may safely lay it down, as a large and
general rule, that all this prodigious warfare re-
quired to free the civilized world from peril of
barbarian attack served greatly to increase the dif-
ficulty of solving the great initial problem of civ-
ilization. In the first place, the turbulence thus
arising was a serious obstacle to the formation of
closely-coherent political aggregates ; as we see ex-
emplified in the terrible convulsions of the fiftli
and sixth centuries, and again in the ascendency
acquired by the isolating features of feudalism be-
tween the time of Charles the Great and the time

^'Manifest Destiny,''^ 117

of Louis VI. of France. In the second place, this
perpetual turbulence was a serious obstacle to the
preservation of popular liberties. It is a very dif-
ficult thing for a free people to maintain its free
constitution if it has to keep perpetually fighting
for its life. The "one-man-power," less fit for'
carrying on the peaceful pursuits of life, is sure to
be brought into the foreground in a state of end-
less warfare. It is a still more diflScult thing for|
a free people to maintain its free constitution when
it undertakes to govern a dependent people des-
potically, as has been wont to happen when a por-
tion of the barbaric world has been overcome and
annexed to the civilized world. Under the weight
of these two diflSculties combined, the free institu-
tions of the ancient Eomans succumbed, and their
government gradually passed into the hands of a
kind of close corporation more despotic than any-
thing else of the sort that Europe has ever seen.
This despotic character — this tendency, if you will
pardon the phrase, towards the Asiaticization of
European life — was continued by inheritance in
the Koman Church, the influence of which was
beneficent so long as it constituted a wholesome
check to the isolating tendencies of feudalism, but
began to become noxious the moment these ten-
dencies yielded to the centralizing monarchical ten-

118 American Political Ideas,

dency in nearly all parts of Europe. The asiati-
cizing tendency of Eoman political life had be-
come so powerful by the fourth century, and has
since been so powerfully propagated through the
Church, that we ought to be glad that the Teu-
tons came into the empire as masters rather than
as subjects. As the Germanic tribes got posses-
sion of the government in one part of Europe after
another, they brought with them free institutions
again. The political ideas of the Goths in Spain,
of the Lombards in Italy, and of the Franks and
Burgundians in Gaul, were as distinctly free as
those of the Angles in Britain. But as the out-
come of the long and uninterrupted turmoil of the
Middle Ages, society throughout the continent of
Europe remained predominantly military in type,
and this fact greatly increased the tendency to-
wards despotism which was bequeathed by Rome.
After the close of the thirteenth century the whole
power of the Church was finally thrown into the
scale against the liberties of the people ; and as the
result of all these forces combined, we find that at
the time when America was discovered govern-
ment was hardening into despotism in all the great
countries of Europe except England. Even in
England the tendency towards despotism had be-
gun to become quite conspicuous after the whole-

^'Mcmifest DestinyP 119

sale slaughter of the great barons and the confis-
cation of their estates which took place in the
Wars of the Roses. The constitutional history of
England during the Tudor and Stuart periods is
mainly the history of the persistent effort of the
English sovereign to free himself from constitu-
tional checks, as his brother sovereigns on the con-
tinent were doing. But how different the result !
How enormous the political difference between
William III. and Louis XIY., compared with the
difference between Henry YIII. and Francis I. !
The close of the seventeenth century, which marks
the culmination of the asiaticizing tendency in
Europe, saw despotism both political and religious
firmly established in France and Spain and Italy,
and in half of Germany ; while the rest of Ger-
many seemed to have exhausted itself in the at-
tempt to throw off the incubus. But in England
this same epoch saw freedom both political and re-
ligious established on so firm a foundation as never
again to be shaken, never again with impunity to
be threatened, so long as the language of Locke
and Milton and Sydney shall remain a living
speech on the lips of men. Now this wonderful
difference between the career of popular liberty
in England and on the Continent was due no doubt
to a complicated variety of causes, one or two of

120 Americcm Political Ideas.

which I have already sought to point out. In my
first lecture I alluded to the curious combination
of' circumstances which prevented anything like a
severance of interests between the upper and the
lower ranks of society; and something was also
said about the feebleness of the grasp of imperial
Kome upon Britain compared with its grasp upon
the continent of Europe. But what I wish now
to point out — since we are looking at the military
aspect of the subject — is the enormous advantage
of what we may call the si/rategic position of Eng-
land in the long mediaeval struggle between civ-
ilization and barbarism. In Professor Stubbs's ad-
mirable collection of charters and documents illus-
trative of English history, we read that " on the
6th of July [1264] the whole force of the country
was summoned to London for the 3d of August,
to resist the army which was coming from France
under the queen and her son Edmund. The in-
vading fleet was prevented hy the weather from
sailing until too late in the season. . . . The papal
legate, Guy Foulquois, who soon after became
Clement lY., threatened the barons with excom-
munication, but the bull containing the sentence
was taken by the men of Dover as soon as it ar-
rived, and was thrown into the sea."* As I read

* Stubbs, " Select Charters." 401.

^^ Manifest Destiny^ 121

this, I think of the sturdy men of Connecticut
beating the drum to prevent the reading of the
royal order of James II. depriving the colony of
the control of its own militia, and feel with pride
that the indomitable spirit of English liberty is
alike indomitable in every land where men of
English race have set their feet as masters. But
as the success of Americans in withstanding the
unconstitutional pretensions of the crown was
greatly favoured by the barrier of the ocean, so tlie
success of Englishmen in defying the enemies of
their freedom has no doubt been greatly favoured
by the barrier of the British channel. The war
between Henry III. and the barons was an event
in English history no less critical than the war be-
tween Charles I. and the parliament four centu-
ries later; and British and Americans alike have
every reason to be thankful that a great French
army was not able to get across the channel in
August, 1264. Nor was this the only time when
the insular position of England did goodly service
in maintaining its liberties and its internal peace.
We cannot forget how Lord Howard of Effingham,
aided also by the weather, defeated the armada that
boasted itself " invincible," sent to strangle free-
dom in its chosen home by the most execrable and
ruthless tyrant that Europe has ever seen, a tyrant

122 American Political Ideas.

whose victory would have meant not simply the
usurpation of the English crown but the establish-
ment of the Spanish Inquisition at Westminster
Hall. Nor can we forget with what longing eyes
the Corsican barbarian who wielded for mischief
the forces of France in 1806 looked across from
Boulogne at the shores of the one European land
that never in word or deed granted him homage.
But in these latter days England has had no need
of stormy weather to aid the prowess of the sea-
kings who are her natural defenders. It is impos-
sible for the thoughtful student of history to walk
across Trafalgar Square, and gaze on the image of
the mightiest naval hero that ever lived, on the
summit of his lofty column and guarded by the
royal lions, looking down towards the government-
house of the land that he freed from the dread
of Napoleonic invasion and towards that ancient
church wherein the most sacred memories of Eng-
lish talent and English toil are clustered together,
— it is impossible, I say, to look at this, and not
admire both the artistic instinct that devised so
happy a symbolism, and the rare good -fortune
of our Teutonic ancestors in securing a territorial
position so readily defensible against the assaults
of despotic powers. But it was not merely in the
simple facility of warding off external attack that

''Momifest Destiny:' 123

the insular position of England was so serviceable.
This ease in warding off external attack had its
most niarked effect upon the internal polity of
the nation. It never became necessary for the
English government to keep up a great standing
army. For purposes of external defence a navy
was all-suflBcient; and there is this practical differ-
ence between a permanent army and a permanent
navy. Both are originally designed for purposes
of external defence; but the one can readily be
used for purposes of internal oppression, and the
other cannot. Nobody ever heard of a navy put-
ting up an empire at auction and knocking down
the throne of the world to a Didius Julianus.
When, therefore, a country is effectually screened
by water from external attack, it is screened in a
way that permits its normal political development
to go on internally without those manifold mili-
tary hinderances that have ordinarily been so ob-
structive in the history of civilization. Hence we
not only see why, after the Norman Conquest had
operated to increase its unity and its strength,
England enjoyed a far greater amount of security
and was far more peaceful than any other country
in Europe; but we also see why society never
assumed the military type in England which it
assumed upon the continent; we see how it was

r-^

124 Americmi Political Ideas.

that the bonds of feudalism were far looser here
than elsewhere, and therefore how it happened
that nowhere else was the condition of the com-
mon people so good politically. We now begin
to see, moreover, how thoroughly Professor Stubbs
and Mr. Freeman are justified in insisting upon
the fact that the political institutions of the Ger-
mans of Tacitus have had a more normal and un-
interrupted development in England than any-
where else. Nowhere, indeed, in the whole history
of the human race, can we point to such a well-
rounded and unbroken continuity of political life
as we find in the thousand years of English his-
tory that have elapsed since the victory of William
the ]N"orman at Senlac. In England the free gov-
ernment of the primitive Aryans has been to this
day uninterruptedly maintained, though every-
where lost or seriously impaired on the continent
of Europe, except in remote Scandinavia and im-
pregnable Switzerland. But obviously, if in the
conflict of ages between civilization and barbarism
England had occupied such an inferior strategic
position as that occupied by Hungary or Poland
or Spain, if her territory had been liable once or
twice in a century to be overrun by fanatical Sar-
acens or beastly Mongols, no such remarkable and
quite exceptional result could have been achieved.

^'Manifest DestinyP 125

Having duly fathomed the significance of this stra-
tegic position of the English race while confined
within the limits of the British islands, we are
now prepared to consider the significance of the
stupendous expansion of the English race which
first became possible through the discovery and
settlement of North America. I said, at the close
of my first lecture, that the victory of Wolfe at
Quebec marks the greatest turning-point as yet
discernible in all modern history. At the first
blush such an unqualified statement may have
sounded as if an American student of history
were inclined to attach an undue value to events
that have happened upon his own soil. After the
survey of universal history which we have now
taken, however, I am fully prepared to show that
the conquest of the North American continent by
men of English race was unquestionably the most
prodigious event in the political annals of man-
kind. Let us consider, for a moment, the cardinal
facts which this English conquest and settlement
of North America involved.

Chronologically the discovery of America coin-
cides precisely with the close of the Middle Ages,
and with the opening of the drama of what is
called modern history. The coincidence is in
many ways significant. The close of the Middle

126 American Political Ideas.

Ages — as we have seen — was characterized by the
increasing power of the crown in all the great
countries of Europe, and by strong symptoms of
popular restlessness in view of this increasing pow-
er. It was characterized also by the great Prot-
estant outbreak against the despotic pretensions
of the Church, which once, in its antagonism to
the rival temporal power, had befriended the lib-
erties of the people, but now (especially since the
death of Boniface YIII.) sought to enthrall them
with a tyranny far worse than that of irresponsible
king or emperor. As we have seen Aryan civili-
zation in Europe struggling for many centuries to
prove itself superior to the assaults of outer bar-
barism, so here we find a decisive struggle begin-
ning between the antagonist tendencies which had
grown up in the midst of this civilization. Hav-
ing at length won the privilege of living without
risk of slaughter and pillage at the hands of Sara-
cens or Mongols, the question now arose whether
the people of Europe should go on and apply their
intelligence freely to the problem of making life as
rich and fruitful as possible in varied material and
spiritual achievement, or should fall forever into
the barren and monotonous way of living and think-
ing which has always distinguished the half-civil- '
ized populations of Asia. This — and nothing less

"Manifest Destiny:^ 127

than this, I think — was the practical political ques-
tion really at stake in the sixteenth century between
Protestantism and Catholicism. Holland and Eng-
land entered the lists in behalf of the one solution
of this question, while Spain and the Pope defended
the other, and the issue was fought out on European
soil, as we have seen, with varying success. But
the discovery of America now came to open up
an enormous region in which whatever seed of
civilization should be planted was sure to grow to
such enormous dimensions as by and by to exert
a controlling influence upon all such controver-
sies. It was for Spain, France, and England to
contend for the possession of this vast region, and
to prove by the result of the struggle which kind
of civilization was endowed with the higher and
sturdier political life. The race which here should
gain the victory was clearly destined hereafter to
take the lead in the world, though the rival pow-
ers could not in those days fully appreciate this
fact. They who founded colonies in America as
trading-stations or military outposts probably did
not foresee that these colonies must by and by
become imperial states far greater in physical
mass than the states which planted them. It is
not likely that they were philosophers enough to
foresee that this prodigious physical development

128 Americcm Political Ideas.

would mean that the political ideas of the parent
state should acquire a hundred-fold power and sem-
inal influence in the future work of the world. It
was not until the American Revolution that this
began to be dimly realized by a few prescient
thinkers. It is by no means so fully realized even
now that a clear and thorough - going statement
of it has not somewhat an air of novelty. When
the highly-civilized community, representing the
ripest political ideas of England, was planted in
America, removed from the manifold and com-
plicated checks we have just been studying in the
history of the Old World, the growth was porten-
tously rapid and steady. There were no Attilas
now to stand in the way, — only a Philip or a Pon-
tiac. The assaults of barbarism constituted only
a petty annoyance as compared with the conflict
of ages which had gone on in Europe. There was
no occasion for society to assume a military as-
pect. Principles of self-government were at once
put into operation, and no one thought of calling
them in question. When the neighbouring civili-
zation of inferior type — I allude to the French in
Canada — began to become seriously troublesome,
it was struck down at a blow. When the mother-
country, under the guidance of an ignorant king
and short-sighted ministers, undertook to act upon

''Manifest DestmyP 129

the antiquated theory that the new ^.ommunities
were merely groups of trading-stations, the politi-
cal bond of connection was severed ; yet the war
which ensued was not like the war which had but
just now been so gloriously ended by the victory
of Wolfe. It was not a struggle between two dif-
ferent peoples, like the French of the Old Regime
and the English, each representing antagonistic
theories of how political life ought to be conduct-
ed. But, like the Barons' War of the thirteenth
century and the Parliament's War of the seven-
teenth, it was a struggle sustained by a part of the
English people in behalf of principles that time
has shown to be equally dear to all. And so the is-
sue only made it apparent to an astonished world
tliat instead of one there were now two Engla/nds^
alike prepared to work with might and main to-
ward the political regeneration of mankind.

Let us consider now to what conclusions the
rapidity and unabated steadiness of the increase of
the English race in America must lead us as we
go on to forecast the future. Carlyle somewhere
speaks slightingly of the fact that the Americans
double their numbers every twenty years, as if
to have forty million dollar-hunters in the world
were any better than to have twenty million dol-
lar-hunters ! The implication that Americans are

9

130 American Political Ideas.

nothing but dollar-hunters, and are thereby dis-
tinguishable from the rest of mankind, would not
perhaps bear too elaborate scrutiny. But during
the present lecture we have been considering the
gradual transfer of the preponderance of physical
strength from the hands of the war-loving portion
of the human race into the hands of the peace-
loving portion, — into the hands of the dollar-hunt-
ers, if you please, but out of the hands of the
scalp-hunters. Obviously to double the numbers
of a pre-eminently industrious, peaceful, orderly,
and free-thinking community, is somewhat to in-
crease the weight in the world of the tendencies
that go towards making communities free and or-
derly and peaceful and industrious. So that, from
this point of view, the fact we are speaking of is
well worth considering, even for its physical di-
mensions. I do not know whether the United
States could support a population everywhere as
dense as that of Belgium ; so I will suppose that,
with ordinary improvement in cultivation and in
the industrial arts, we might support a population
half as dense as that of Belgium, — and this is no
doubt an extremely moderate supposition. Now
a very simple operation in arithmetic will show
that this means a population of fifteen hundred
millions, or more than the population of the whole

''^Manifest Destiny^'* 131

world at the present date. Another very simple
operation in arithmetic will show that if we were
to go on doubling our numbers, even once in ev-
ery twenty -five years, we should reach that stu-
pendous figure at about the close of the twentieth
century, — that is, in the days of our great-great-
grandchildren. I do not predict any such result,
for there are discernible economic reasons for be-
lieving that there will be a diminution in the rate
of increase. The rate must nevertheless continue
to be very great, in the absence of such causes as
formerly retarded the growth of population in
Europe. Our modern wars are hideous enough,
no doubt, but they are short. They are settled
with a few heavy blows, and the loss of life and
property occasioned by them is but trifling when
compared with the awful ruin and desolation
wrought by the perpetual and protracted contests
of antiquity and of the Middle Ages. Chronic
warfare, both private and public, periodic famines,
and sweeping pestilences like the Black Death, —
these were the things which formerly shortened
human life and kept down population. In the ab-
sence of such causes, and with the abundant capac-
ity of our country for feeding its people, I think
it an extremely moderate statement if we say that
by the end of the next century the English race in

132 American Political Ideas.

the United States will number at least six or seven
hundred millions.

It used to be said that so huge a people as this
could not be kept together as a single national ag-
gregate,— or, if kept together at all, could only be
so by means of a powerful centralized government,
like that of ancient Rome under the emperors. I
think we are now prepared to see that this is a
great mistake. If the Roman Empire could have
possessed that political vitality in all its parts
which is secured to the United States by the prin-
ciples of equal representation and of limited state
sovereignty, it might well have defied all the shocks
which tribally-organized barbarism could ever have
directed against it. As it was, its strong central-
ized government did not save it from political dis-
integration. One of its weakest political features
was precisely this, — that its "strong centralized
government " was a kind of close corporation, gov-
erning a score of provinces in its own interest
rather than in the interest of the provincials. In
contrast with such a system as that of the Roman
Empire, the skilfully elaborated American system
of federalism appears as one of the most impor-
tant contributions that the English race has made
to the general work of civilization. The working
out of this feature in our national constitution, by

"Manifest Bestinyy 133

Hamilton aud Madison and their associates, was
the finest specimen of constructive statesmanship
that the world has ever seen. Not that these states-
men originated the principle, but they gave form
and expression to the principle which was latent
in the circumstances under which the group of
American colonies had grown up, and which sug-
gested itself so forcibly that the clear vision of
these thinkers did not fail to seize upon it as the
fundamental principle upon which alone could the
affairs of a great people, spreading over a vast con-
tinent, be kept in a condition approaching to some-
thing like permanent peace. Stated broadly, so
as to acquire somewhat the force of a universal
proposition, the principle of federalism is just
this: — that the people of a state shall have full
and entire control of their own domestic affairs,
which directly concern them only, and which they
will naturally manage with more intelligence and
with more zeal than any distant governing body
could possibly exercise ; but that, as regards mat-
ters of common concern between a group of states,
a decision shall in every case be reached, not by
brutal warfare or by weary diplomacy, but by the
systematic legislation of a central government
which represents both states and people, and
whose decisions can always be enforced, if neces-

134 Americcm Political Ideas.

sarj, by the combined physical power of all the
states. This principle, in various practical appli-
cations, is so familiar to Americans to-day that we
seldom pause to admire it, any more than we stop
to admire the air which we breathe or the sun
which gives us light and life. Yet I believe that
if no other political result than this could to-day
be pointed out as coming from the colonization of
America by Englishmen, we should still be justi-
fied in regarding that event as one of the most im-
portant in the history of mankind. For obviously
the principle of federalism, as thus broadly stated,
contains within itself the seeds of permanent peace
between nations; and to this glorious end I be-
lieve it will come in the fulness of time.

And now we may begin to see distinctly what
it was that the American government fought for
in the late civil war, — a point which at the time
was by no means clearly apprehended outside the
United States. We used to hear it often said,
while that war was going on, that we were fight-
ing not so much for the emancipation of the ne-
gro as for the maintenance of our federal union ;
and I well remember that to many who were
burning to see our country purged of the folly
and iniquity of negro slavery this used to seem
like taking a low and unrighteous view of the

''Ma/tiifest DestinyP 135

case. From the stand-point of universal history
it was nevertheless the correct and proper view.
The emancipation of the negro, as an incidental
result of the struggle, was a priceless gain which
was greeted warmly by all right-minded people.
But deeper down than this question, far more
subtly interwoven with the innermost fibres of
our national well-being, far heavier laden too
with weighty consequences for the future weal
of all mankind, was the question whether this
great pacific principle of union joined with inde-
pendence should be overthrown by the first deep-
seated social difficulty it had to encounter, or
should stand as an example of priceless value to
other ages and to other lands. The solution was
well worth the effort it cost. There have been
many useless wars, but this was not one of them,
for more than most wars that have been, it was
fought in the direct interest of peace, and the vic-
tory so dearly purchased and so humanely used
was an earnest of future peace and happiness for
the world.

The object, therefore, for which the American
government fought, was the perpetual maintenance
of that peculiar state of things which the federal
union had created, — a state of things in which,
throughout the whole vast territory over which

136 American Political Ideas.

the Union holds sway, questions between states,
like questions between individuals, must be settled
by legal argument and judicial decisions and not
by wager of battle. Far better to demonstrate
this point once for all, at whatever cost, than to
be burdened hereafter, like the states of Europe,
with frontier fortresses and standing armies and
all the barbaric apparatus of mutual suspicion!
For so great an end did this most pacific people
engage in an obstinate war, and never did any
war so thoroughly illustrate how military power
may be wielded, when necessary, by a people that
has passed entirely from the military into the in-
dustrial stage of civilization. The events falsified
all the predictions that were drawn from the con-
templation of societies less advanced politically.
It was thought that so peaceful a people could
not raise a great army on demand ; yet within a
twelvemonth the government had raised five hun-
dred thousand men by voluntary enlistment. It
was thought that a territory involving military
operations at points as far apart as Paris and Mos-
cow could never be thoroughly conquered; yet
in April 1865 the federal armies might have
marched from end to end of the Gulf States with-^
out meeting any force to oppose them. It was
thought that the maintenance of a great army

''Manifest Destiny:' 137

would beget a military temper in the Americans
and lead to manifestations of Bonapartism, — do-
mestic usurpation and foreign aggression ; yet the
moment the work was done the great army van-
ished, and a force of twenty-five thousand men
was found sufficient for the military needs of the
whole country. It was thought that eleven states
which had struggled so hard to escape from the
federal tie could not be re-admitted to voluntary
co-operation in the general government, but must
henceforth be held as conquered territory, — a most
dangerous experiment for any free people to try.
Yet within a dozen years we find the old federal
relations resumed in all their completeness, and
the disunion party powerless and discredited in
the very states where once it had wrought such
mischief. Kay more, we even see a curiously
disputed presidential election, in which the votes
of the southern states were given almost with
unanimity to one of the candidates, decided quiet-
ly by a court of arbitration ; and we see a univer-
sal acquiescence in the decision, even in spite of
a general belief that an extraordinary combina-
tion of legal subtleties resulted in adjudging the
presidency to the candidate who was not really
elected.

Such has been the result of the first great at-

138 American Political Ideas.

tempt to break up the federal union in America.
It is not probable that another attempt can ever
be made with anything like an equal chance of
success. Here were eleven states, geographically
contiguous, governed by groups of men who for
half a century had pursued a well-defined policy in
common, united among themselves and marked off
from most of the other states by a difference far
more deeply rooted in the groundwork of society
than any mere economic difference, — the differ-
ence between slave-labour and free-labour. These
eleven states, moreover, held such an economic re-
lationship with England that they counted upon
compelling the naval power of England to be used
in their behalf. And finally it had not yet been
demonstrated that the maintenance of the federal
union was something for which the great mass of
the' people would cheerfully fight. Never could
the experiment of secession be tried, apparently,
under fairer auspices; yet how tremendous the
defeat ! It was a defeat that wrought conviction,
— the conviction that no matter how grave the
political questions that may arise hereafter, they
must be settled in accordance with the legal meth-
ods the Constitution has provided, and that no
state can be allowed to break the peace. It is the
thoroughness of this conviction that has so greatly

''Manifest DestinyP , 139

facilitated the reinstatement of the reyolted states
in their old federal relations ; and the good sense
and good faith with which the southern people,
in spite of the chagrin of defeat, have accepted
the situation and acted upon it, is something un-
precedented in history, and calls for the warmest
sympathy and admiration on the part of their
brethren of the north. The federal principle in
America has passed through this fearful ordeal
and come out stronger than ever ; and we trust it
will not again be put to so severe a test. But
with this principle unimpaired, there is no reason ,
why any further increase of territory or of popu- /
lation should overtask the resources of our gov-
ernment.

In the United States of America a century hence
we shall therefore doubtless have a political aggre-
gation immeasurably surpassing in power and in
dimensions any empire that has as yet existed, j
But we must now consider for a moment the prob-
able future career of the English race in other parts
of the world. The colonization of North America
by Englishmen had its direct effects upon the east-
ern as well as upon the western side of the Atlan-
tic. The immense growth of the commercial and
naval strength of England between the time of
Cromwell and the time of the elder Pitt was iuti-

140 American Political Ideals,

matelj connected with the colonization of Korth
America and the establishment of plantations in
the "West Indies. These circumstances reacted
powerfully upon the material development of Eng-
land, multiplying manifold the dimensions of her
foreign trade, increasing proportionately her com-
mercial marine, and giving her in the eighteenth
century the dominion over the seas. Endowed
with this maritime supremacy, she has with an un-
erring instinct proceeded to seize upon the keys of
empire in all parts of the world, — Gibraltar, Mal-
ta, the isthmus of Suez, Aden, Ceylon, the coasts
of Australia, island after island in the Pacific, —
every station, in short, that commands the path-
ways of maritime commerce, or guards the ap-
proaches to the barbarous countries which she is
beginning to regard as in some way her natural
heritage. Any well-filled album of postage-stamps
is an eloquent commentary on this maritime su-
premacy of England. It is enough to turn one's
head to look over her colonial blue-books. The
natural outcome of all this overflowing vitality it
is not difficult to foresee. No one can carefully
watch what is going on in Africa to-day without
recognizing it as the same sort of thing which was
going on in North America in the seventeenth
century ; and it cannot fail to bring forth similar

^^ Manifest Destiny P 141

results in course of time. Here is a vast country,
rich in beautiful scenery and in resources of tim-
ber and minerals, with a sahibrious climate and
fertile soil, with great navigable rivers and inland
lakes, which will not much longer be left in con-
trol of tawny lions and long-eared elephants and
negro fetich-worshippers. Already live flourishing
English states have been established in the south,
besides the settlements on the Gold Coast and
those at Aden commanding the Ked Sea. English
explorers work their way, with infinite hardship,
through its untra veiled wilds, and track the courses
of the Congo and the Nile as their forefathers
tracked the Potomac and the Hudson. The work
of La Salle and Smith is finding its counterpart in
the labours of Baker and Livingstone. Who can
doubt that within two or three centuries the Afri-
can continent will be occupied by a mighty nation
of English descent, and covered with populous cit-
ies and flourishing farms, with railroads and tele-
graphs and other devices of civilization as yet un-
dreamed of ?

If we look next to Australia, we find a country
of more than two-thirds the area of the United
States, with a temperate climate and immense
resources, agricultural and mineral, — a country
sparsely peopled by a race of irredeemable savages

142 Americcm Political Ideas.

hardly above the level of brutes. Here England
within the present century has planted six great-
ly thriving states, concerning which I have not
time to say much, but one fact will serve as a speci-
men. When in America we wish to illustrate in
one word the wonderful growth of our so-called
north-western states, we refer to Chicago, — a city
of half-a-million inhabitants standing on a spot
which fifty years ago was an uninhabited marsh.
In Australia the city of Melbourne was founded in
1837, the year when the present queen of England
began to reign, and the state of which it is the
capital was hence called Victoria. This city, now'^
just forty-three years old, has a population half as
great as that of Chicago, has a public library of
200,000 volumes, and has a university with at least
one professor of world-wide renown. When we
see, by the way, within a period of five years and
at such remote points upon the earth's surface,
such erudite and ponderous works in the English
language issuing from the press as those of Pro-
fessor Hearn of Melbourne, of Bishop Colenso of
Natal, and of Mr. Hubert Bancroft of San Fran-
cisco,— even such a little commonplace fact as this
is fraught with wonderful significance when we

* In 1880.

''Manifest Destiny, ^^ 143

think of all that it implies. Then there is New
Zealand, with its climate of perpetual spring, where
the English race is now multiplying faster than
anywhere else in the world unless it be in Texas
and Minnesota. And there are in the Pacific Ocean
many rich and fertile spots where we shall very
soon see the same things going on.

It is not necessary to dwell upon such consider-
ations as these. It is enough to point to the gen-
eral conclusiorij'that the work which tHe English
race began when it colonized North America is

r destined to go on until every land on the earth's
surface that is not already the seat of an old civil-
ization shall become English in its language, in its

V political habits and traditions, and to a predomi-
nant extent in the blood of its people. The day is
at hand when four-fifths of the human race will
trace its pedigree to English forefathers, as four-
fifths of the white people in the United States
trace their pedigree to-day. The race thus spread
over both hemispheres, and from the rising to the
setting sun, will not fail to keep that sovereignty
of the sea and that commercial supremacy which
it began to acquire when England first stretched
its arm across the Atlantic to the shores of Vir-
ginia and Massachusetts. The language spoken by
these great communities will not be sundered into

144 American Political Ideas.

dialects like the language of the ancient Koraans,
but perpetual intercommunication and the univer-
sal habit of reading and writing will preserve its
integrity ; and the world's business will be trans-
acted by English-speaking people to so great an
extent, that whatever language any man may have
learned in his infancy he will find it necessary
sooner or later to learn to express his thoughts in
English. And in this way it is by no means im-
probable that, as Grimm the German and CandoUe
the Frenchman long since foretold, the language
of Shakespeare may ultimately become the lan-
guage of mankind.

In view of these considerations as to the stupen-
dous future of the English race, does it not seem
very probable that in due course of time Europe
— which has learned some valuable lessons from
America already — will find it worth while to adopt
the lesson of federalism ? Probably the European
states, in order to preserve their nelative weight
in the general polity of the world, will find it nec-
essary to do so. In that most critical period of
American history between the winning of inde-
pendence and the framing of the Constitution,
one of the strongest of the motives which led the
confederated states to sacrifice part of their sov-
ereignty by entering into a federal union was their

''^Manifest l)estiny.^^ 145

keen sense of their weakness when taken severally.
In physical strength such a state as Massachusetts
at that time amounted to little more than Ham-
burg or Bremen ; but the thirteen states taken to-
gether made a nation of respectable power. Even
the wonderful progress we have made in a century
has not essentially changed this relation of things.
Our greatest state, New York, taken singly, is
about the equivalent of Belgium; our weakest
state, Nevada, would scarcely be a match for the
county of Dorset ; yet the United States, taken to-
gether, are probably at this moment the strongest
nation in the world.

Now a century hence, with a population of six
hundred millions in the United States, and a hun-
dred and fifty millions in Australia and New Zea-
land, to say nothing of the increase of power in
other parts of the English-speaking world, the rel-
ative weights will be very diflFerent from what they
were in 1788. The population of Europe will not
increase in anything like the same proportion, and
a very considerable part of the increase will be
transferred by emigration to the English-speaking
world outside of Europe. By the end of the twen-
tieth century such nations as France and Germany
can only claim such a relative position in the po-
litical world as Holland and Switzerland now oc-
10

146 American Political Ideas,

cupy. Their greatness in thought and schol^fship,
in industrial and aesthetic art, will doubtless con-
tinue unabated. But their political weights will
severally have come to be insignificant ; and as we
now look back, with historic curiosity, to the days
when Holland was navally and commercially the
rival of England, so people will then need to be
reminded that there was actually once a time when
little France was the most powerful nation on the
earth. It will then become as desirable for the
states of Europe to enter into a federal union as
it was for the states of North America a century
ago.

It is only by thus adopting the lesson of feder-
alism that Europe can do away with the chances
of useless warfare which remain so long as its dif-
ferent states own no allegiance to any common
authority. War, as we have seen, is with barbar-
ous races both a necessity and a favourite occupa-
tion. As long as civilization comes into contact
with barbarism, it remains a too frequent neces-
sity. But as between civilized and Christian na-
tions it is a wretched absurdity. One sympathizes
keenly with wars such as that which Russia has
lately concluded, for setting free a kindred race
endowed with capacity for progress, and for hum-
bling the worthless barbarian who during four cen-

^^Momifest Destiny. ^^ 147

turies has wrought such incalculable damage to the
European world. But a sanguinary struggle for
the Rhine frontier, between two civilized Chris-
tian nations who have each enough work to do in
the world without engaging in such a strife as this,
will, I am sure, be by and by condemned by the
general opinion of mankind. Such questions will
have to be settled by discussion in some sort of
federal council or parliament, if Europe would
keep pace with America in the advance towards
universal law and order. All will admit that such
a state of things is a great desideratum : let us see
if it is really quite so Utopian as it may seem at
the first glance. No doubt the lord who dwelt in
Haddon Hall in the fifteenth century would have
thought it very absurd if you had told him that
within four hundred years it would not be neces-
sary for country gentlemen to live in great stone
dungeons with little cross-barred windows and loop-
holes from which to shoot at people going by. Yet
to-day a country gentleman in some parts of Mas-
sachusetts may sleep securely without locking his
front-door. We have not yet done away with rob-
bery and murder, but we have at least made pri-
vate warfare illegal ; we have arrayed public opin-
ion against it to such an extent that the police-
court usually makes short shrift for the misguided

148 American Political Ideas.

man who tries to wreak vengeance on his enemy.
Is it too much to hope that by and by we may sim-
ilarly put public warfare under the ban ? I think
not. Already in America, as we have seen, it has
become customary to deal with questions between
states just as we would deal with questions be-
tween individuals. This we have seen to be the
real purport of American federalism. To have
established such a system over one great continent
is to have made a very good beginning towards
establishing it over the world. To establish such
a system in Europe will no doubt be difficult, for
here we have to deal with an immense complica-
tion of prejudices, intensified by linguistic and eth-
nological differences. Nevertheless the pacific press-
ure exerted upon Europe by America is becoming
so great that it will doubtless before long over-
come all these obstacles. I refer to the industrial
competition between the old and the new worlds,
which has become so conspicuous within the last
ten years. Agriculturally Minnesota, Nebraska,
and Kansas are already formidable competitors
with England, France, and Germany ; but this is
but the beginning. It is but the first spray from
the tremendous wave of economic competition
that is gathering in the Mississippi valley. By
and by, when our shameful tariff — falsely called

^'Manifest DestinyP 149

"protective" — shall have been done awaj with,
and onr manufacturers shall produce superior arti-
cles at less cost of raw material, we shall begin to
compete with European countries in all the mar-
kets of the world; and the competition in manu-
factures will become as keen as it is now begin-
ning to be in agriculture. This time will not be
long in coming, for our tariff-system has already
begun to be discussed, and in the light of our
present knowledge discussion means its doom.
Born of crass ignorance and self-defeating greed,
it cannot bear the light. When this curse to
American labour — scarcely less blighting than the
curse of negro slavery — shall have been once re-
moved, the economic pressure exerted upon Eu-
rope by the United States will soon become very
great indeed.^ It will not be long before this
economic pressure will make it simply impossible
for the states of Europe to keep up such military
armaments as they are now maintaining. The
disparity between the United States, with a stand-
ing army of only twenty-five thousand men with-
drawn from industrial pursuits, and the states of
Europe, with their standing armies amounting to
four millions of men, is something that cannot
possibly be kept up. The economic competition
will become so keen that European armies will

150 AmeriGom Political Ideas.

have to be disbanded, the swords will have to be
turned into ploughshares, and thus the victory of
the industrial over the military type of civilization
will at last become complete. But to disband the
great armies of Europe will necessarily involve
the forcing of the great states of Europe into some
sort of federal relation, in which Congresses — al-
ready held on rare occasions — will become more
frequent, in which the principles of international
law will acquire a more definite sanction, and in
which the combined physical power of all the
states will constitute (as it now does in America)
a permanent threat against any state that dares to
wish for selfish reasons to break the peace. In
some such way as this, I believe, the industrial de-
velopment of the English race outside of Europe
will by and by enforce federalism upon Europe.
As regards the serious difficulties that grow out
of prejudices attendant upon differences in lan-
guage, race, and creed, a most valuable lesson is
furnished us by the history of Switzerland. I am
inclined to think that the greatest contribution
which Switzerland has made to the general prog-
ress of civilization has been to show us how such
obstacles can be surmounted, even on a small scale.
To surmount them on a great scale will soon be-
come the political problem of Europe; and it is

^^Mcmifest DestinyP 151

America which has set the example and indicated
the method.

Thus we may foresee in general outline how,
through the gradual concentration of the prepon-
derance of physical power into the hands of the
most pacific communities, the wretched business
of warfare must finally become obsolete all over
the globe. The element of distance is now fast
becoming eliminated from political problems, and
the history of human progress politically will con-
tinue in the future to be what it has been in
the past, — the history of the successive union of
groups of men into larger and more complex ag-
gregates. As this process goes on, it may after
many more ages of political experience become
apparent that' there is really no reason, in the na-
ture of things, why the whole of mankind should
not constitute politically one huge federation, —
each little group managing its local affairs in en-
tire independence, but relegating all questions of
international interest to the decision of one cen-
tral tribunal supported by the public opinion of
the entire human race. I believe that the time
will come when such a state of things will exist
upon the earth, when it will be possible (with our
friends of the Paris dinner-party) to speak of the
United States as stretching from pole to pole, —

152 American Political Ideas.

or, with Tennyson, to celebrate the " parliament
of man and the federation of the world." In-
deed, only when such a state of things has begun
to be realized, can Civilization, as sharply demar-
cated from Barbarism, be said to have fairly be-
gun. Only then can the world be said to have
become truly Christian. Many ages of toil and
doubt and perplexity will no doubt pass by before
such a desideratum is reached. Meanwhile it is
pleasant to feel that the dispassionate contempla-
tion of great masses of historical facts goes far
towards confirming our faith in this ultimate tri-
umph of good over evil. Our survey began with
pictures of horrid slaughter and desolation : it ends
with the picture of a world covered with cheerful
homesteads, blessed with a sabbath of perpetual
peace.

INDEX,

Abderrahman, 115.

Achaian league, 76.

Aden, 140.

Adoption, 38.

^tolian league, 76.

Africa, English colonies in,
141.

Albany Congress, 95.

Amphiktyonic Council, 72.

Angeln, 105.

Angles, 118.

Anglo-American, 104.

Anglo-Saxon, 104.

Appomattox, 7.

Arable mark, 39.

Ariovistus, 111.

Armada, the Invincible, 121.

Armies of Europe will be dis-
banded, 150.

Arminius, 7.

Arnold, M., 27.

Asiaticization, 117, 126.

Athens, grandeur of, 57 ; in-
corporated demes of Attika,
68 ; old tribal divisions mod-
ified, 68 ; school of political
training, 72; maritime em-
pire of, 75.

Attila, 112, 114, 128.
Australia, 142.
Austria, 97.

Baker, Sir S., 141.
Bancroft, Hubert, 142.
Barons, war of the, 120, 121,

129.
Basileus, 67.
Batu, 113.
Belgium, 145.
Benefices, 46.
Bern, 88.

Bonaparte, N., 122.
Bonapartism, 137.
Boroughs, special privileges

of, 66.
Boston, growth of, 31, 64; its

Common, 40.
Boundaries of United States,

101.
Burgundians, 118.
By-laws, 46.

C^SAR, J., Ill, 118.
California, social experiments

in, 93.
Canada under Old Regime, 56.

154

Index.

CandoUe, A. de, 140.

Canton, 61.

Carlyle on dollar-hunters, 129.

Centralized government,weak-
ness of, 132.

Century, 61.

Ceylon, 140.

CMlons, battle of, 112.

Charles I., 121.

Charles the Bold, 51.

Charles Martel, 116.

Charles the Great, 113, 116.

Chatham, Lord, 7.

Chester, 64.

Chicago, 142.

Chinese, 115.

Christianity, 81.

Church, mediaeval, 118, 126.

Cities in England and Amer-
ica, 34; origin of, 64.

City, the ancient, 59, 64-69, 85.

Civilization, its primary phase,
106 ; long threatened by
neighbouring barbarism,
108.

Clan-system of political union,
38, 60.

Claudius, emperor, 81.

Clement IV., 120.

Cleveland, city of. 22.

Colenso,J.W.,142.

Colonies, how founded, 27.

Comitia, 67, 82.

Commendation, 47.

Commons, House of, 51.

Commons, origin of, 39.

Communal farming in Eng-
land, 46.

Communal landholding, 8, 39.

Competition, industrial, be-
tween Europe and Amer-
ica, 148.

Confederation, articles of, 96.

Connecticut, men of, defy
James II., 121.

Constitution of the United
States, 96.

Continentals and British, 104.

Cromwell, O., 7, 29.

Curia, 61.

Delian confederacy, 75.

Deme, 62.

Departments of France, 63.

Dependencies, danger of gov-
erning them despotically,
83, 117, 137.

Didius Julianus, 123.

Diocletian, 84.

Domestic service in a New
England village, 23.

Dorset, 145.

Dover, men of, throw papal
bull into sea, 120.

Duke, 63.

Dutch republic, 87.

Ealdorman, 63, 67.
Ecclesia, 67.
Eden, Chuzzlewit's, 65.
Electoral commission, 137.
Emancipation of slaves, 135.

Index.

165

England, maritime supremacy
of, 140.

English colonization, 56, 91;
language, future of, 144;
self-government, how pre-
served, 50, 87, 120-124 ; vil-

Famines, 131.

Federal union on great scale,
conditions of, 91 ; its dura-
bleness lies in its flexibility,
92.

Federalism, pacific implica-
tions of, 99, 134; will be
adopted by Europe, 144.

Federation and conquest, 74.

Federations in Greece, 76.

Feudal system, origin of, 46.

Fick, A., 38.

France, political development
of, 52 ; contrasted with Eng-
land as a colonizer, 54, 127.

France and Germany, their
late war, 147 ; their political
weight a century hence, 146.

Francis I., 119.

Franklin, B., 95.

Franks, 113, 118.

Freeman, E. A., 7, 28, 36, 102,
103, 124.

Freiburg, 88.

French villages, 20.

Gau, 62.

Gaul, Roman conquest of, 112.

Geneva, 88.

Gens, 37.

Georgia, 95.

Germany conquered and con-
verted by Charles the Great,
113.

Gibraltar, 140.

Goths, 118.

Great states, method of form-
ing, 74; notion of their hav-
ing an inherent tendency to
break up, 89 ; difficulty of
forming, 107.

Grimm, J. , 144.

Haddon Hall, 147.

Hamburg, 145.

Hamilton, A., 133.

Hampden, J., 29, 105.

Hannibal's invasion of Italy, 80.

Hearn, Professor, 142.

Henry Vm., 119.

Heretoga, 63.

Hindustan, village communi-
ties in, 42 ; cities in, 64.

Holland, 103, 146.

Howard of Effingham, 121.

Hundred, 61.

Himgary, 124.

Hunnish invasion of Europe,
112.

Incorporation, 59, 78.
Iroquois tribes, 38.

James II., 121.

156

Index.

Jinghis Khan, 113.
Judiciary, federal, 99.

Kansas, 148.
Kemble, J.,39,45.
Kingship among ancient Teu-
tons, 42.

La Salle, R., 141.

Lausanne, 88.

Leo's defeat of the Saracens,

116.
Lewes, battle of, 7.
Liegnitz, battle of, 114.
Lincoln, A. , 7.
Lincoln, city of, 64.
Livingstone, Dr., 141.
Lombards, 118.
London, growth of, 31.
Louis VL, 117.
Louis XIV., 119.

Madison, J., 133.

Maine, Sir H., 8, 43.

Maintz, 64.

Malta, 140.

Manorial courts, 48.

Manors, origin of, 46.

March meetings in New Eng-
land, 31. -

Marius, C, 111.

Mark, 37-41, 61 ; in England,
44r-49; meaning of the word,
47.

Mark-mote, 41.

Massachusetts, 20-36. 145.

May assemblies in Switzev

land, 36.
Melbourne, city of, 142.
Middle Ages, turbulence of,

47, 86.
Military strength of civilized

world, its increase, 109-115.
Minnesota, 143, 148.
Mir, or Russian village, 42-44.
Mongolian Khans in Russia,

43.
Mongols, 124, 126.
Montenegro, 97.
Montfort, S. de, 7, 51, 71, 105.

Naseby, battle of, 7.

Navies less dangerous than

standing armies, 123.
Nebraska, 148.
Nelson's statue in Trafalgar

Square, 122.
Nevada, 97, 145.
New England confederacy, 94.
New York, 97, 145.
New Zealand, 143.
Norman conquest, 123.
North America, struggle for

possession of, 127.

Omab, 115.

Pagus, 62.

Paris, American dinner-party
in, 101, 106, 151.

Parish, its relation to town-
ship, 48.

Index.

157

Parkman, F., 55, 73.

Pax romana, 81.

Peace of the world, how se-
cured, 109, 150.

Peerage of England, 28, 50.

Peloponnesian war, 76, 80.

Persian war against Greece,110.

Pestilences, 131.

Petersham, 9.

Philip, King, 128.

Phratries, 61.

Pictet, A.,38.

Poland, 124.

Pontiac, 128.

Population of United States a
century hence, 131.

Private property in land, 39.

Problem of political civiliza-
tion, 6, 35, 85, 108.

Protestantism and Catholi-
cism, political question at
stake between, 126.

Prussia conquered by Teuton-
ic knights, 113.

Puritanism, 26.

Puritans of New England,
their origin, 28.

Quebec, Wolfe's victory at,
7, 56, 125.

Rebellion against Charles I.,

121, 129.
Redivision of arable lands, 40.
Re-election of town officers,

33.

Representation unknown to
Greeks and Romans, 59, 71-
77; origin of, 70 ; federal, in
United States, 97.

Rex, 67.

Rhode Island, 97.

Roman law, 81.

Rome, plebeian revolution at,
69 ; early stages of, 78 ; se-
cret of its power, 79 ; advan-
tages of its dominion, 81;
causes of its political fail-
ure, 82-85, 117, 132 ; power-
ful influence of, in Middle
Ages, 87, 118; meaning of
its great wars, 110.

Roses, wars of the, 119.

Ross, D., 8, 39.

Russia, Mongolian conquest
of, 114; village communi-
ties in, 40 ; its late war
against the Turks, 146; its
despotic government con-
trasted with that of France
under Old Regime, 43.

Saracens, 115, 124, 126.
Scandinavia, 124.
Secession, war of, 100,134-139.
Selectmen, 32.
Self-government preserved in

England, 50, 87, 120 ; lost in

France, 52.
Shakespeare, 21.
Shires, 62.
Shottery, cottage at, 21.

168

Index.

Smith, J., 141.

Social war, 79.

South Carolina, 95.

Spain, Roman conquest of,
111.

Sparta, 68, 71, 75.

State sovereignty in America,
95.

Strasburg, 64.

Strategic position of England,
120-124.

Stubbs,W.,45,48,120,124.

Suez, 140.

Swiss cantonal assemblies, 36.

Switzerland, lesson of its his-
tory, 88, 150 ; self - govern-
ment preserved in, 124.

Tacitus, 37, 41, 124.

Tariff in America, 149.

Tax-taking despotisms, 43.

Tennyson, A., 152.

Teutonic civilization contrast-
ed with Graeco-Roman, 60,
63,65,69,86.

Teutonic knights, 113.

Teutonic viUage communities,
37.

Texas, 97, 143.

Thegnhood, 28.

Thirty Years' War, 119.

Thukydides, 57.

Tocqueville, 35.

Tourist in United States, 17.

Town, meaning of the word,
47.

THE

Town-meetings, origin of, 36-
49.

Town-names formed from pat-
ronymics, 45.

Township in New England,
31 ; in western states, 34.

Tribe and shire, 62.

Turks, 116, 146.

Versailles, 21.
Vestry-meetings, 48.
Victoria, Australia, 142.
Village-mark, 39.
Villages of New England, 18-

25.
Virginia, parishes in, 34.
Visigoths, 113.

Wallace, D. M., 18, 43,

War of independence, 95, 129.

Warfare, universal in early
times, 73 ; how diminished,
109; interferes with politi-
cal development, 116 ; less
destructive now than in an-
cient times, 131 ; how effec-
tively waged by the most
pacific of peoples, 136.

Washington, city of, 65.

Washington, G., 7, 96, 105.

William III., 119.

Witenagemote, 50, 63.

Wolfe's victory at Quebec, 7,
56, 125.

YORKTOWN, 7.
END.

By POULTNEY BIGELOW

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